Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In an era where hybrid environments and AI-driven innovations redefine enterprise operations, organizations face increasing complexity, disruption, and vulnerability in their systems. To overcome this growing challenge, Cisco and Splunk are working together to harness the power of AI to help customers ensure that digital resilience is an inherent part of their systems.

Recently, while visiting a friend in a local hospital, I found myself facing a frustrating distraction: trying to pay parking fees using USSD (a mobile text-based system for quick transactions). The service was either painfully slow or not working at all. I wasn’t alone. Other visitors were just as exasperated, and parking attendants stood idle, their handheld devices frozen in endless loading loops.

Splunk recently announced exciting updates and significant modernizations for the upcoming releases of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform. This blog is the first in a series to help prepare your organization for these changes by exploring upgrade readiness best practices. This first installment will highlight the Splunk Health Assistant Add-On, a vital tool that supplements the Splunk Enterprise Monitoring Console, designed to streamline your transition to the next version of Splunk Enterprise.

Cloud computing has become the backbone of modern business operations, powering everything from day-to-day collaboration to large-scale digital transformation initiatives. As organizations deepen their reliance on cloud services, the financial stakes continue to grow. According to Gartner, global spending on public cloud services is projected to reach over $720 billion in 2025, a significant increase from nearly $600 billion in 2024.

Starting from scratch with synthetic testing of your web properties and APIs can be difficult. Questions like “what should we be testing?” will very quickly become exercises in figuring out “how can we actually do that?” which may involve sifting through various elements of the DOM or JSON responses. But there are shortcuts to synthetic testing mastery!

Observability isn’t about collecting more telemetry — it’s about making that telemetry data meaningful. Contextual observability transforms raw telemetry into actionable insights by enriching it with consistent tagging and metadata. Without context, telemetry data remains fragmented, troubleshooting slows, and aligning with business priorities is nearly impossible.

Business process automation no longer sits on the sidelines. What was once an emerging technology is now the engine behind modern business operations. In fact, around 60% of companies already use automation tools in their workflows, according to Duke University. This is not just companies — developers are also contributing to this shift by adopting low-code, no-code, and digital process automation platforms. These new tools remove barriers that once slowed innovation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing businesses across industries. From personalized customer experiences to predictive analytics and process automation, there are hardly any sectors untouched by AI's impact. Its applications in data management aren't left behind. In fact, AI has the potential to transform traditional data management practices.

Tech is entering another wave of innovation with AI. With accelerated innovation comes increased complexity in already disparate environments. For Defense, those complexities are compounded by the need to maintain and operate mission critical infrastructure with highly sensitive data in air-gapped environments, often running on custom digital systems and applications. Accelerating the speed of innovation with leading technology is key for the military to maintain its competitive edge.

For observability adoption to scale, you must eliminate the bottlenecks. A self-service approach is the only sustainable model, enabling all teams–not just a select few–to access, implement, and scale observability easily. But making the shift requires more than access: you have to design for it.