For networking teams — and the engineering and IT operations teams that depend on them — the stakes are higher than ever.

Organizations depend on digital experiences for just about everything. Apps and data are distributed across vastly complex ecosystems of clouds, infrastructure, and networks, both owned and unowned. And siloed teams often lack the skills and resources to manage it all and respond quickly if issues arise (and they do!).

Add in the challenges of agentic AI, and things will only get more complicated.

But Cisco has a uniquely powerful yet simplified solution. Through its Splunk Observability and Cisco ThousandEyes portfolios, Cisco supports an unprecedented level of digital resilience, enabling users to isolate and remediate issues before costly downtime sets in.

To learn more, we spoke with Joe Vaccaro, VP and GM of Cisco ThousandEyes, and Patrick Lin, SVP and GM of Observability at Splunk — just prior to Splunk’s annual .conf25 event in Boston.

 

Thank you, Joe and Patrick! From a high-level perspective, how does the product integration of Splunk and Cisco ThousandEyes up the ante in digital resilience?

JV — When people think about Splunk and ThousandEyes, they hear confidence — confidence that they'll be able to see issues early, that they'll know where the issues are localized, confidence in the ability to fix issues fast, and verify that the delivery of the digital experience has returned to normal levels after the change. Integrations between Splunk and ThousandEyes combine Splunk's real-time observability with ThousandEyes’ end-to-end assurance. Together, ThousandEyes and Splunk are unique in our ability to truly see things from client to cloud, to see it everywhere, across every core part of every segment, of every connection. And then be able to understand it in ways that allow us to move through detection, diagnosis, and remediation as quickly as possible. Because at the end of the day, that's what digital resilience means. Can you have that level of confidence to know it before it impacts your business?

It sounds like a lot of teams currently lack that confidence.

PL — A big problem today is that the skill sets required to keep things up and running are in short supply. And the ones that do have those skills spend most of their time with specialized tools that rely on proprietary agents, and focus on narrow slices of the overall environment. Digital resilience by definition is going to require broader visibility, and these siloed tools lead to siloed operational teams. You need to understand what's happening to the end user in their mobile app, what's happening in the back-end application services and infrastructure that serve up the experience, not to mention the connectivity layer that ties them all together. With the bi-directional integration we’ve done between Splunk and ThousandEyes, you're now able to bring all the data associated with understanding those experiences into one single source of truth — for the data, but contextualized for the different parties that are involved.

So, an ops team can now get a very precise picture, no matter where the problem arises.

JV — Yes, and that’s a great word that Patrick used: context. If you think about how issues manifest, many times the network is blamed for an outage, but equally so, the application might be blamed, or the infrastructure team, and so forth. So, we've done a lot of work to break down these silos. Between Splunk and ThousandEyes, not only do we know whether it's, for example, an application issue, but we know the exact time that issue occurred. We know where within the application the latency increased, or we know exactly where in the network the issue is. We know from the intelligence about a corresponding change across the network that occurred at that same point in time. That ability to correlate context from the client to the cloud and the application is incredibly powerful for our customers — to be able to deliver on that vision of digital resilience.

What are some unique strengths of each product. Joe, let’s start with Cisco ThousandEyes.

JV — There’s an analogy around traffic that I like to use. So, imagine Kevin, you're driving across town to an important meeting, and you're using Waze or Google Maps, and on your screen you see a route and the estimated time of arrival. Suddenly the application says, “heavy traffic ahead; you're going to be 15 minutes late.” That's your early warning system. And in many ways, we can think of ThousandEyes as an assurance platform for digital experiences. In this story of traffic, the city itself is our customer’s network, both the owned and the unowned path. The streets are the connections that their traffic and their data take, from the user's device, through the office of their branch, across the internet, into the cloud, and into the application. And so, ThousandEyes watches the entire trip in real time, even the streets that you don't own. It knows that the traffic is moving, it knows that there's a bridge that's closed, and potentially recommends an alternate path. And ultimately, it's helping you to proactively understand an issue before users are impacted.

Patrick, how about Splunk?

PL — Let me extend Joe’s analogy. With Splunk, you’re looking at what’s happening with all the other pieces — how is your car running, is there space in the lot where you need to park your car to get to the meeting on time, are the other participants there already. This is similar to how, say, Google Earth complements Waze.

So with Splunk IT Service Intelligence and the Splunk core platform, we look at and understand all the different events occurring out there. It might be that you've got slowness in part of the network or a database that is responding in a strange way. Oftentimes these things are correlated, and you want to understand the entirety of the incident and zoom out to see the big picture, just like you can with Google Earth, so that you can dive into the right part of the environment and tackle the right issues.

Splunk Observability Cloud is the other key piece of the puzzle. It’s about providing unified visibility across any environment and any stack, and so where it really shines is around understanding application performance, infrastructure performance, as well the real user experience in an application. And because of that unified visibility, you have earlier detection of problems and faster investigation. I’m going to butcher the Google Earth analogy a bit here, but it’s kind of as if you had updates every ten seconds on the situation at that parking lot you’re headed to, so that you not only know if you have space when you get there, but which parking spots are open, in real time.

How can Splunk and Cisco ThousandEyes continue to position organizations to meet future challenges — and opportunities — especially given the demands of agentic AI?

PL — We are helping to solve today's problems in a way that is very real to our customers. But we are also looking ahead to where our customers are going as they adopt and build applications and experiences using agentic AI. With its non-deterministic behavior and the prospect of autonomous multi-agent action, things will only get more complicated, and ultimately what you're going to need is data at scale, unified, and contextual. And we’re bringing together all the data that Cisco and Splunk capture, all the data that runs through the Cisco networks, all the data that Splunk captures, across the network, in the security domain, in the applications, to help our customers meet the challenges that are coming.

JV — Yes, AI is only as good as the underlying data. You cannot magically make AI useful if it's not backed by great and comprehensive data. And with ThousandEyes and Splunk, our ability to see such a vast and wide perspective of a digital experience will be huge. And then when you think about the data that Cisco brings in aggregate across security, across the network, and across the data-center infrastructure, it’s going to set Cisco apart. Ultimately, I believe it’s going to make our customers into superheroes that leverage the incredible capabilities that agentic AI brings.