Cisco has announced a series of enhancements to the Splunk Observability portfolio, introducing AI-powered features aimed at providing broader visibility and actionable insights across digital operations.
The company stated that through integration between Cisco technologies and Splunk, customers can achieve improved visibility and data correlation across networks, infrastructure, and applications. This is expected to support organisations seeking to enhance reliability across their digital environments.
Agentic AI innovations
The enhancements focus on what Cisco describes as an "agentic AI-powered, AI-native approach to observability". This approach integrates several new capabilities, including AI troubleshooting agents, automated alert correlation, AI agent monitoring for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents, as well as increased support for hybrid application monitoring.
Patrick Lin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Splunk Observability, commented, "Our mission is clear – to help organizations put AI applications and agents to work, while retaining visibility and control. With the latest innovations in Splunk Observability, we are empowering enterprises to proactively monitor their critical applications and digital services with ease, resolve issues before they escalate, and ensure the value and outcomes they derive from observability are commensurate with the cost."
Splunk's approach to observability uses AI-driven agents that automate the collection of telemetry data and configuration of alerts, detect and diagnose incidents, and recommend solutions. These agents are intended to free IT operations (ITOps) and engineering teams to focus on other tasks.
Key features
The company detailed a range of new capabilities:
- AI Troubleshooting Agents: Available in Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics, these features automatically analyse incidents and identify potential root causes.
- Event iQ: Offered through Splunk IT Service Intelligence, the tool aids in configuring alert correlations and reducing incident noise.
- ITSI Episode Summarisation: This function automatically summarises grouped alerts to provide overviews of incident trends, impacts, and root causes.
- AI Agent Monitoring: Allows customers to monitor the performance, quality, security, and cost efficiency of AI agents and LLMs, ensuring alignment with business goals and expenditure.
- AI Infrastructure Monitoring: Focuses on monitoring the health and consumption of AI infrastructure, alerting users of issues that may lead to increases in cost or reduced performance.
- Session Replay for Real User Monitoring: Offers browser and mobile session replay features in Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud, supporting teams to analyse and optimise end-user experiences.
Additional updates include deeper integration between Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud. Enhanced application performance management (APM) capabilities support both cloud-native and traditional three-tier applications, with expanded support for hybrid environments.
Monitoring AI environments
Cisco has placed emphasis on supporting organisations as they introduce AI and LLM workloads into operations. With more businesses using AI-driven applications and agents, specialised monitoring and analytics are required to ensure these technologies function as intended and meet cost expectations.
The new AI Agent Monitoring tool is designed to "monitor the quality, security, and cost of LLMs and AI agents to determine whether models are performing at the right price and as intended, to align with business goals." Concurrently, the AI Infrastructure Monitoring system is aimed at proactively identifying bottlenecks and spikes across services to help manage costs and mitigate risks.
End-user and business impact
The updated Splunk Observability Cloud now includes Business Insights and Digital Experience Analytics, which seek to correlate the performance of applications with the real-time health of key business processes. This gives teams increased access to data on user journeys and system behaviours, aiding in the identification of issues affecting customer experience.
Session Replay for Real User Monitoring allows for the review of user interactions via browser and mobile sessions, contributing to closer analysis and potential improvements to online user experiences. The integration of Splunk RUM with Cisco ThousandEyes gives users the ability to align real-user experiences with underlying network performance metrics, helping to identify and localise network-related disruptions.
Analyst comments
"Through the new agentic AI innovations within Splunk Observability, Cisco offers organizations more proactive visibility and actionable insights into both their digital operations and AI system health and performance. These kinds of capabilities are critical as enterprises look to scale AI in a controlled and reliable manner," said Torsten Volk, Principal Analyst, Application Modernization at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Availability
The company stated that new features such as Splunk AI Agent Monitoring, AI Troubleshooting Agents, ITSI Episode Summarisation, Business Insights, Digital Experience Analytics, and Splunk RUM Integration with Cisco ThousandEyes are now available or will soon enter private preview stages. All other enhancements have been launched and are currently available globally.
Cisco added that some products and features are still under active development, and their timelines for release or availability may change as the solutions continue to evolve.
