Cisco Live 2025 San Diego, which I had the pleasure of attending, can be distilled into Observability and Agentic AI, which, in the context of Cisco, are both closely related to the acquisition of Splunk.

Cloud native systems, like Netflix, have a distributed and complex architecture consisting of hundreds of microservices at a global scale. Traditional monitoring tools became insufficient, and the idea of observability evolved. Instead of only monitoring known issues, observability emphasizes the ability to ask new questions about a system’s behavior using telemetry (logs, metrics, etc).

Splunk is a full-fledged observability platform giving Cisco the ability to store and analyze telemetry from Catalyst Center, Nexus Dashboard and Meraki to everything in between. It does not hurt to have a massive dataset neatly structured in the age of AI either, and the Cisco AI Canvas dashboard looks really cool.

I should also not that Cisco was pushing their firewalls and security platform like never before: secure AI, secure network – pretty much everything started with or included the word secure in the Keynotes. Firewalls have been a bumpy road for Cisco, but it looks like it has matured and it honestly looks good based on the sessions I went to.