In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, where customer experience, operational efficiency, and digital resiliency are paramount, achieving Unified Performance Monitoring and Observability across networks and applications has become critical. As organizations increasingly rely on on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, the need for real-time visibility and the ability to make data-driven decisions has never been more evident. This is where Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance, together with Splunk, offers a transformative Cross-Domain Performance Monitoring and Observability solution.
The Need for Wide-Angle (Full-Stack) with (Microscopic) Micro-Second Visibility
In modern IT environments, fragmented monitoring leads to inefficiencies, missed performance anomalies, and SLA challenges. Traditionally, network and application monitoring were separate, limiting cross-domain data collection and correlation. Provider Connectivity Assurance enhances Splunk’s network intelligence capabilities by delivering high-value network performance alerts that Splunk can correlate with Logs, SNMP, NetFlow, and third-party applications, providing comprehensive insights for faster issue resolution. Provider Connectivity Assurance simulates network traffic, using synthetic traffic generation to measure two-way or one-way measurement that can be used with correlating network health and application performance for comprehensive visibility across the entire digital stack, covering infrastructure, applications, and user experience, ensuring optimal service reliability.
Additionally, Provider Connectivity Assurance can support other time series data, such as router telemetry or server performance, such as latency, packet loss, throughput, jitter, and bandwidth utilization. By integrating these insights with Splunk's extensive capabilities in application performance monitoring (APM), log management, and IT operations analytics, organizations can achieve a comprehensive view of their entire infrastructure in a single dashboard.
What Provider Connectivity Assurance Brings to The Table
The combination of Provider Connectivity Assurance with Splunk allows organizations to ingest telemetry and network performance data for advanced analytics and insights. Provider Connectivity Assurance provides microsecond-level insights on metrics such as latency and packet loss, while Splunk correlates this data across multiple domains and applications. This synergy transforms detailed network insights into actionable intelligence, enabling organizations to understand performance comprehensively and make faster, data-driven decisions.
Provider Connectivity Assurance is a cloud-native performance assurance and analytics solution, also offered on-premises, and designed to support large-scale networks. Using optimized data and advanced AI algorithms to ensure high-quality, accurate data processing enables faster insights and better decision-making, while significantly reducing alert fatigue. The solution pre-aggregates data for faster query performance. This streamlined approach reduces query processing times, allowing users to access actionable insights and make real-time decisions across large networks and vast amounts of time series data, ultimately enhancing productivity and driving faster business outcomes.
Provider Connectivity Assurance together with Splunk facilitates:
- Deep Network and Application Correlation: Organizations can now correlate real-time network performance data, including metadata schema with applications, telemetry, logs, metrics, and traces. This comprehensive approach enables teams to identify the root causes of issues, whether originating from the network, application, or infrastructure layers, thereby reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- Precise Alerts: Provider Connectivity Assurance is engineered to continuously monitor critical network performance metrics, such as uptime, latency, jitter, and throughput. With integration into Splunk, organizations can establish custom alerts that are accurate and timely for better response.
- Granular Insights with AI-Driven Analytics: Provider Connectivity Assurance offers fine-grained network performance data, KPIs and alerts, Splunk’s AI-powered analytics empower organizations to delve into real-time and historical data. This approach enables detailed understanding of network behavior and felicitates the identification of performance trends, with predictive analytics.
Key Benefits of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Integration with Splunk
- Enhanced Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis
Complex networks often encompass on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based services, and hybrid environments. Identifying the root cause of performance issues can be time-consuming, particularly when data is fragmented across various tools. Provider Connectivity Assurance and Splunk work together to seamlessly provide comprehensive, correlated multi-domain insights that enhance decision-making without the limitations of data silos.
Provider Connectivity Assurance Synthetic Tests deliver Real Benefits:
- Microsecond accuracy is critical for high-performance, latency-sensitive environments, such as financial trading platforms, telecommunications, and 5G networks
- Microburst capacity monitoring (1ms) is essential for detecting short, intense spikes in network traffic that can occur within milliseconds. Microburst can overwhelm network buffers, leading to packet loss, increased latency, or degraded application performance.
- Full line rate service activation testing (SAT) testing and remote packet capture on-demand
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- Proactive Performance Monitoring
The real-time monitoring of both network and application performance enables organizations to detect issues before they escalate into significant outages. Provider Connectivity Assurance supports exceptionally granular data at the microsecond level of precision, ensuring that proactive performance monitoring enables faster remediation of degradations to be captured and analyzed in real time.
Real User Traffic Capture Benefits:
- Live traffic capture aids in proactive issue identification for better network performance
- Granular insights enable efficient troubleshooting, pinpointing, and resolving issues promptly
- Understand real user traffic for efficient resource allocation based on user demands and user experience.
This data undergoes a transformative process, resulting in actionable insights leveraging flexible metadata tagging schema, customized dashboards, alerts, and reports. IT teams can establish predefined thresholds for critical performance indicators (KPIs), such as network latency, jitter, and packet loss, and promptly receive notifications when these thresholds are exceeded. This proactive approach to performance monitoring facilitates swift remediation and contributes to the maintenance of elevated service reliability.
- Operational Intelligence Elevated
Provider Connectivity Assurance and Splunk enhance service delivery and drive business outcomes. Providing a holistic view of the network and IT ecosystem, offering real-time and historical data for teams to identify performance trends, assess infrastructure changes, and optimize resources. This insight is crucial for organizations using cloud-native applications and hybrid infrastructures to ensure operational efficiency.
Why Cross-Domain Performance Monitoring and Observability is a Must Have
Cross-domain performance monitoring and observability is crucial for organizations to achieve full visibility across distributed networks and sprawling applications while also ingesting non-traditional data sources. By collecting data not just from logs and metrics, but also from telemetry, events, firewalls, and third-party applications, businesses can break down silos, gain actionable insights, and accelerate issue diagnosis by correlating key events with performance metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of their entire infrastructure.
Provider Connectivity Assurance the expert in network performance monitoring, paired with Splunk, tackles these challenges by delivering real-time network visibility while leveraging advanced data analytics for rapid pattern detection and performance optimization. This combined solution excels in IT management, security, and compliance, offering unmatched capabilities like millisecond-level monitoring and in-depth cross-domain insights that many other solutions lack.
Conclusion
As IT environments grow in complexity, real-time visibility across domains is critical. Together Provider Connectivity Assurance and Splunk accelerate decision-making, and streamlines troubleshooting by unifying AI-Powered Network Performance Monitoring and Observability. This integration provides essential insights for maintaining service reliability, and delivering exceptional user experiences, ensuring organizations remain agile and adaptable to evolving demands.
Availability
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance integration with Splunk will be available in Provider Connectivity Assurance software release 25.02
Splunk support for Provider Connectivity Assurance, starting in software release 9.0
To learn More about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
