Cisco and Splunk Bring Full-Stack Observability to the Entire Enterprise

We’re excited to announce that soon after the acquisition, Splunk and Cisco started teaming up to deliver engineers and ITOps teams with an improved leading observability experience. With the forces of Splunk and Cisco joined together, observability practitioners will be able to enjoy a new level of troubleshooting and monitoring across their entire stack, regardless of their deployment model. 

Our Goal: End-To-End Visibility for the Whole Organization

Two powerful entities in the observability space are coming together.

On the one hand, we have Cisco, a powerhouse in the networking, cybersecurity and software market. Cisco’s observability offerings comprised of AppDynamics, Cisco AIOps, and more provide unparalleled visibility into the network and traditional tier-three apps.

On the other hand, we have Splunk, a security and observability organization named a leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability.  Splunk offers industry-defining log analytics along with best-in-class cloud-native observability, ranging from microservices, and infrastructure to end-user monitoring.

Together, they are bringing full-stack observability to the entire enterprise. Engineers and ITOps professionals using Splunk and Cisco can enjoy unified visibility across any environment and any stack — spanning the network, infrastructure, monoliths to microservices, homegrown and 3rd-party apps running in any cloud or on-prem. On top of that, Splunk and Cisco users get to enjoy powerful real-time analytics for earlier detection and investigations of business-impacting issues. 

By combining the two, practitioners improve their operational efficiency by using common data and workflows to ensure reliability across tech stacks, whether they’re self-hosted or cloud-native, so their entire journey is covered. Now, ITOps and Engineering teams confidently see across their entire digital footprint and standardize their observability practice on one solution.

Contextual Troubleshooting Across Any Stack and Any Environment

Cisco and Splunk each bring their own set of powerful capabilities and solutions. But we know that together, everything is better, so our team is building new ways to let engineers and ITOps professionals effectively leverage both products, for full-stack visibility into their environment, regardless of the deployment model.  

We’re integrating logs from Splunk Platform with Cisco AppDynamics for faster and in-context troubleshooting across on-prem and hybrid environments, similar to our existing Splunk Log Observer Connect feature. Operations teams can tap into the power of Splunk and Cisco AppDynamics while centralizing their logs and analyzing them in-context to reduce the length of their investigation journeys. 

Additionally, we plan to power Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) with AppDynamics data to reduce alert noise and get end-to-end visibility of on-prem, hybrid, and cloud applications correlated with business KPIs. Soon, users will be able to integrate events and bring application performance & business metrics from AppDynamics into ITSI for faster troubleshooting across hybrid and cloud applications. In the future, we also expect engineers and network practitioners to be able to combine Cisco AIOps networking devices and infrastructure data with Splunk ITSI for more accurate in-context troubleshooting of their networking.

Seamless, Centralized and Unified Experience for Faster Operations

When two solutions merge, a common concern amongst users is the absence of interoperability or streamlined workflows. Rest assured, Splunk has you covered.

Soon, Splunk Observability Cloud users will experience a new and improved interface which will be more aligned with Cisco’s AppDynamics design to ensure a modern, consistent, and improved experience and navigation across both solutions. Our team is also planning on enabling Single Sign-On between Cisco AppDynamics, Splunk Cloud Platform, and Splunk Observability Cloud to eliminate logging frictions across products.

ITOps and engineering teams using Splunk and AppDynamics will also in the longer term be able to find contextual deep links across both solutions for in-context and predictable troubleshooting experience for the whole tech stack.

We are excited to bring new, cool features that allow everyone to benefit from observability no matter where they are on their cloud and application modernization journey. This is just the beginning, so stay tuned!