Cisco IT’s observability technique

Within the face of rising IT complexity, Cisco IT unified observability throughout its world setting. The outcomes: 25% fewer main incidents, 45% sooner decision, and scalable automation. Right here’s how we did it—and suggestions to your digital resilience journey.

Our problem: fragmented visibility

Many organizations battle with fragmented monitoring and extended incident decision. We confronted the identical challenges and wanted to interrupt down information silos to guard our fast-changing setting.  

In Cisco IT, managing our world, dispersed IT panorama is more and more advanced. Fragmented information and visibility gaps have been making it more and more tough to keep up digital resilience amid our fast-paced innovation and frequent environmental adjustments. We wanted a technique to flip our information into actionable insights however lacked a unified observability platform to centralize and make sense of all of it. 

When a significant database outage in 2024 revealed our fragmented information — uncorrelated alerts throughout associated gadgets delaying trigger identification — we knew we needed to rethink our observability strategy.  

“After the outage, we knew we needed to rethink every little thing. The transformation wasn’t nearly expertise, however empowering our engineers to behave sooner and smarter.”
– Chuck Churchill, Snr. Director, IT Observability, Cisco IT

This inflection level sparked a broader shift in how Cisco IT approached observability. Within the video under, Cisco IT leaders share what modified — and the way it led to a 25% discount in main incidents. 

Getting began

Like all IT situation, understanding the basis trigger was important earlier than remediation planning may start. Constructing stronger digital resilience isn’t any totally different. 

In working with our groups, we pinpointed the next as high problem areas that have been hindering our efforts:

• Fragmented information and visibility gaps: With over 100,000 endpoints, we generated huge volumes of telemetry information. Siloed monitoring instruments led to alert fatigue and visibility gaps, slowing response instances and limiting our potential to foretell and stop points. 
• Dangers from frequent adjustments: Our tradition of innovation and early adoption means fixed adjustments to our IT environments. We noticed a direct hyperlink between fast change and elevated incidents, so minimizing disruption with out slowing innovation grew to become important. 
• Useful resource optimization: As the environment and information complexity grew, it grew to become important to enhance how we leverage AI and information extra successfully. We wanted to show our information into actionable insights that empower engineers, not overwhelm them, to make sure productiveness stored tempo with progress. 

“Bringing all our information collectively was step one—turning it into actual, actionable insights is what really allows us to remain resilient as the environment evolves.”
– Jon Heaton, Director, Community Engineering and Operations, Cisco IT

Deciding on our three-pronged observability strategy

Digital resilience requires greater than merely deploying new instruments. We wanted a holistic strategy that may span our total IT panorama. We obtaind this by structuring our IT observability apply throughout three interconnected pillars: 

1. The community: Safe, dependable community efficiency is crucial for holding the enterprise up and operating. This pillar focuses on complete community visibility, together with third–social gathering supplier networks, to make sure the community is operating securely and optimally for a clean consumer expertise. 
2. Platforms and information: Right here, we deal with observability throughout our information facilities, cloud, and underlying infrastructure, centralizing our observability information to be accessible to your entire group, together with our DevOps and SRE groups, by way of our platform consolidation and information technique.
3. Service Operations: Our Service Operations and Enterprise Operations Heart engineers monitor, analyze, and resolve points utilizing wealthy information and insights delivered from our community, infrastructure, purposes and providers — which feed AI automation to enhance effectivity.  

Including within the important expertise

Every of those observability pillars is powered by a mixture of information, expertise, and processes that allow us to make use of the complete potential of our information and drive larger effectivity by way of AI automation. These core components are important to our observability strategy and success:

• Splunk: Splunk acts because the spine of our observability technique, centralizing information from throughout our community, infrastructure, and purposes to ship a single supply of reality for our IT groups. 
• ThousandEyes: ThousandEyes delivers end-to-end community visibility and consumer expertise monitoring throughout inside and exterior environments, enabling fast identification and backbone of connectivity points. 
• Configuration Administration Database (CMDB): Our CMDB gives a single supply of reality for all IT belongings, enriching alerts and incidents with important context and powering environment friendly, proactive operations. 
• AI Operations: Our AI programs leverage the centralized observability information in Splunk to automate occasion evaluation, cut back alert fatigue, and speed up incident response — empowering engineers to deal with higher-value work. For instance, our Service Operations makes use of varied AI assistants for AI-driven incident administration to foretell incident assignments and counsel decision steps.  

By integrating Splunk with ThousandEyes, our CMDB, and different instruments, we are able to guarantee a seamless, scalable strategy to observability that grows with our enterprise.

Tangible outcomes

This unified observability strategy has helped us deal with our most urgent challenges and enhance outcomes that collectively strengthen our digital resilience. Previously 18 months, we’ve seen:

• Important discount in main incidents: We decreased main incidents by 25% yr over yr and had zero main community incidents, down from 3-4 per quarter beforehand. 
• Sooner, more practical restoration: We lowered our Imply Time to Detect and Resolve by 45% yr over yr, enabling sooner restoration and minimized disruption. 
• Improved change administration: We decreased incidents brought on by change by 20%, enabled by unified information insights and end-to-end visibility that helps smarter change administration processes. 
• Strengthened visibility and information utilization: We now monitor 10x extra community telemetry information that yields deeper insights and 4x larger visibility — enabling earlier detection and proactive decision of potential points earlier than they escalate. 
• Scalable automation and effectivity:  Centralizing information in Splunk has established a basis for continued developments in AIOps, enabling us to develop AI-automations that now deal with 99.998% of ~4 million each day alert — considerably bettering operational effectivity. 

“This journey is as a lot about altering mindsets as deploying expertise. We’re empowering each engineer to behave on insights, not simply alerts.”
– Mark Hutchins, Director, IT Service Administration, Cisco IT

Sensible takeaways

Our digital resilience journey is ongoing, however we be taught extra every day that we share with prospects enhancing their very own journey. We suggest: 

• Gather telemetry from in every single place: Centralize telemetry to optimize probably the most related metrics, occasions, logs and traces from throughout your community, infrastructure, cloud, purposes, and providers. 
• Prioritize information – the bedrock of success: deal with information high quality and hygiene. Correct, clear information is crucial for producing reliable insights and enabling efficient automation. 
• Use what’s already good: First, leverage the programs that you’ve: product capabilities which have AI and observability inbuilt. Second, empower groups to experiment with customized AI options to maximise worth the place your current programs have gaps. 

Keep tuned for updates and learnings as we proceed to innovate and optimize.

“Digital resilience is a shifting goal. We’re all the time studying, adapting, and refining our strategy as the environment evolves.”
– Jon Heaton, Director, Community Engineering and Operations, Cisco IT

 Extra assets:

Discover extra case research to see how Cisco strengthens digital resilience