On Tuesday, at Splunk’s .conf25 user conference in Boston, Cisco announced agentic AI-powered Splunk Observability. This is an AI-native approach to observability that sets a new standard for how customers can strengthen their resilience. The enhanced Splunk Observability portfolio unifies observability across environments, surfaces actionable business context, and deploys AI-powered agents across the full incident response lifecycle, while monitoring both its performance and quality.
Through integrations across Cisco technologies with Splunk, customers gain unmatched visibility and correlation of data insights across their networks, infrastructure, and applications to improve the reliability of their entire digital estate.
“Our mission is clear – to help organizations put AI applications and agents to work, while retaining visibility and control,” said Patrick Lin, SVP and GM of Splunk Observability. “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.”
Agentic AI is reshaping what it takes to build a leading observability practice. As AI-assisted coding gains steam, applications will be built with less human involvement. At the same time, a new wave of AI-enabled applications and AI agents demand specialized telemetry to confirm models are performing as intended – aligned to business purpose and cost. To keep pace, organizations need unified, in-context, visibility across all of these environments to prioritize issues based on business impact.
“We are proud to announce that Splunk has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the third year in a row,” Lin said. “At Splunk, we believe the future of observability is unified, intelligent, and open. This is why we’ve made significant investments across the platform to bring SecOps, ITOps, and engineering teams together to deliver always-on, performant, and secure digital solutions.”
Lin said Splunk believes its key strengths start with complete business visibility across any environment and any stack by connecting shared data and context to business impact and prioritization, earlier detection and faster investigation of business-impacting issues, and better control of data and costs through native, built-in telemetry pipeline capabilities.
“A unified OpenTelemetry-native observability platform, can transform, filter, route, and federate data to optimize volume and reduce spend, so customers can quickly instrument their entire ecosystem using a common standard teams can agree on, without needing to worry about vendor lock-in,” Lin stated.
Cisco’s AgenticOps vision is being enhanced through an upgraded Splunk Observability portfolio, supercharged by new agentic AI innovations. These innovations will deploy AI agents to automate telemetry collection and alert configuration, detect issues, identify root causes, and recommend fixes – freeing ITOps and engineering teams to focus on innovation. These advancements include AI Troubleshooting Agents to automatically analyze incidents and surface potential root causes, Event iQ, in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), which helps teams easily set up automated alert correlation to quickly reduce alert noise and gain clear context on grouped alerts, and ITSI Episode Summarization, which alongside Event iQ, automatically provides overviews of grouped alerts to help troubleshoot faster.
Cisco is bringing the best of Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud together to provide a unified experience across three-tier and microservices environments, and deepening integration with Cisco ThousandEyes so ITOps, NetOps and Engineering teams can pinpoint the network’s impact on application performance and end-user experience.
“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,” said Torsten Volk, Principal Analyst, Application Modernization, at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “These kinds of capabilities are critical as enterprises look to scale AI in a controlled and reliable manner.”
Splunk AI Agent Monitoring, AI Troubleshooting Agents, ITSI Episode Summarization, Business Insights, Digital Experience Analytics, and Splunk RUM Integration with Cisco ThousandEyes are available or will be available soon in Alpha. All other innovations listed are now generally available to all global regions.