Holiday spirit and observability might not seem connected.

But as any grinch can attest, nothing steals festive fun like latency, downtime, and security breaches.

That’s why much of what makes the season merry depends on visibility into every touchpoint of the customer journey — along with the digital resilience to keep all aspects of your operation functioning seamlessly, even during high-demand periods.

With their powerful combination of deep visibility and data insights across the network, infrastructure, and applications, Splunk and Cisco help customers improve the reliability of their entire digital estate — to ensure a seamless holiday experience for all.

Because everything from online browsing and in-store purchases to supply chains and smart factories depends on observability — to see exactly what’s happening as issues arise, if not before, and remediate them fast.

To learn more, we spoke with Mimi Shalash, Splunk’s observability advisor. She shared her thoughts on observability, digital resilience, AI, and real-time digital business insight — through the holidays and beyond.

 

Thank you, Mimi! Maybe we could start with a few quick thoughts on the holiday season and why digital resilience is so critical at this time.

Thanks, Kevin. It’s an important question. The holiday season is one of the most exciting times and includes my favorite sport ... shopping! It’s more competitive than ever. That’s why digital resilience is so critical. The determining factor is almost always predicated off ease of use, customer experience, and the overarching customer journey. This is especially so in an AI-centric world. Digital resilience is more than ever a cornerstone for competitive revenue growth.

We’ll get back to AI in a minute, but all those challenges around the shopping journey are heightened at the holiday season.

Absolutely. I saw a stat that a key retailer processed 240,000 transactions per hour on Black Friday. At that level of scale, if you even have 500 milliseconds of latency, that can convert into abandoned checkout and compound into millions of lost dollars. It’s the difference between you getting frustrated, putting your phone down, and going to a competitor.

Given that added pressure on retailers, shoppers, supply chains, factories, and just about everyone else, how can observability help?

To your point, this is far beyond just an online experience. This is the entire customer journey. And observability needs to go beyond traditional telemetry like infrastructure and applications.

For example, many mature big-box retailers correlate environmental signals such as temperature, lighting, and ambient noise with foot traffic, dwell time, and conversion rates. That data, when analyzed alongside digital interactions, provides insight into how physical conditions influence customer behavior and revenue outcomes.

At its core, observability is about delivering a true 360-degree view of experience, connecting digital performance, physical environments, and human behavior to understand, measure, and continuously improve how a brand engages its customers.

And of course, detecting issues as they arise, if not before.

Yes. It's about predicting issues across these very distributed systems. Predicting the bottlenecks when and where they are going to occur, and then aligning technical key performance indicators to metrics that matter most like net promotor scores, mobile and web experience conversions, revenue, etc. Or even supply chain metrics associated with production overview.

There’s no holiday promotion, but we even have these metrics on our executive dashboards for the Splunk T-shirt Store. That’s the power move, seeing orders in progress, which ones are waiting for shipment, which ones have shipped, and directly tying operational data to revenue exposure and downtime risk!

What makes Splunk unique in the observability space?

That’s a great question. And there are many reasons, but two key differentiators come to mind. One is what we call full-fidelity data. So, no sampling, no blind spots. If you think about the complexity of the world through AI, it’s distributed systems, on prem or cloud native. If you start sampling data for cost concerns or if you sample data because the underlying architecture of your observability platform cannot support it, how are you supposed to surface critical telemetry that’s important across the business?

So, full fidelity. What’s the second?

The second key differentiator is scale. Having a platform that can take in massive amounts of structured and unstructured data, and then more importantly, make something meaningful of it. And I'm pleased to say no one else can do it like we do.

How does the Cisco/Splunk integration make each more powerful and effective?

Cisco sees the network while Splunk sees the digital business. Together, we provide end-to-end visibility, allowing correlation between network issues and production. Many of our customers trust and rely on Cisco’s network telemetry and network visibility, in addition to obviously the infrastructure. So, you take that and you marry it with Splunk’s digital business insights, it creates the opportunity to really focus on those two differentiators ... full-fidelity data and massive scale in a meaningful way that is comprehensive. Only Splunk and Cisco are going to be able to see all of that.

Let’s talk some more about those business insights that Splunk provides.

Exactly. It’s about translating technical signals into business impact. One organization saw subtle degradation in customer-facing response times that never crossed a traditional alert threshold.

By correlating infrastructure metrics, application traces, and Kubernetes events in Splunk, they quickly identified a rogue Kubernetes cluster that had drifted from policy by over-scaling pods, generating abnormal east-west traffic, and quietly consuming shared resources.

Instead of spending days manually analyzing logs and configurations, Splunk surfaced the anomaly early and connected it directly to customer experience risk, allowing the team to remediate before it became a revenue-impacting issue.

And they are presented via an intuitive dashboard.

Yes! When you drill into a unified customer-engagement dashboard, you can move seamlessly across mobile, web, in-store, and contact-center interactions, alongside NPS, conversion rates, and core operational KPIs. What that unlocks is not just a collection of metrics, but a coherent narrative.

You can trace an NPS dip or conversion drop back to very specific drivers like checkout API latency, intermittent errors, fraud-prevention misconfigurations, or downstream dependencies in the checkout flow. By correlating these technical signals with customer and business outcomes, teams can prioritize the issues that matter most and manage the customer experience as an integrated, end-to-end system rather than a set of disconnected data points.

That intuitive dashboard gets to the level of complexity that teams are coping with today. And how AI can help. Security, I think, is a good example.

Absolutely. From a security perspective, AI introduces a more complex threat landscape, more sophisticated adversaries and signals that are increasingly difficult to interpret. The challenge is clear: you can’t effectively defend against what you don’t fully understand.

At the same time, AI is a powerful lever to reduce cognitive load inside the SOC. When applied responsibly, it helps analysts cut through noise and accelerate investigation and remediation workflows. That allows security teams to focus on higher-order threats, emerging risks and attack patterns that may not yet be well understood but obviously matter most to the business.

Thank you again, Mimi. Any final thoughts on how observability and resilience can support a great holiday season?

Spread the word! Splunk and Cisco together deliver true end-to-end visibility, spanning infrastructure, applications, networks, sensors, and physical telemetry. By capturing full-fidelity, unstructured data at scale, organizations can finally translate technical signals into business-critical metrics and decisions that matter at the executive level.

And on that note, happy holidays to all!