While at Cisco Live, I had a discussion with Jon Heaton regarding Cisco’s utilization of technology such as Splunk, ThousandEyes, CMDB, and AI to manage Cisco’s infrastructure for digital resilience. As a Cisco employee, it was a fun peek behind the curtain on the tools I use day-to-day.
Transcript
Auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Speakers are not separately labeled.
Hey everyone, we’re out here at Cisco Live and there’s a a lot of demo stations out here with demo data, but Cisco on Cisco is here talking about real data and how Cisco utilizes their own product and I’m talking to John here. You gave me a lot of rundown. Can you tell us more about what you’re doing? Yeah, so we’re part of Cisco IT. So, we run Cisco’s network for Cisco for all of our employees and partners. And uh we’ve been using Splunk and we’ve been using Thousand Eyes for years, long before acquisition, because they’re great, which is why we acquired them, right? Because they’re important for us to understand what’s happening in our network. Um so we’ve been using them for a long time, but it’s part of our overall strategy to turn on instrumentation everywhere, consume all that instrumentation, uh analyze that data, augment it with data from like our CMDB, which is service now, like almost everybody these days. Um, and so we’re able to take all of that data and do more with it and increase our resiliency, but also most importantly probably is put data in the hands of the operators and users so that they can understand what’s happening in the network, whether it be uh something at the top. So something in the cloud like an application or SAS provider not working well or being able to share data from our thousand eyes client on endpoints on why a specific user cannot get somewhere or is having poor performance because they all like to complain about the network but the network is big and has many components. Yeah. And I would be remiss if we didn’t mention AI at this conference and we were talking earlier about you’re eating even feeding some data into Cisco’s own internal generative AI tool. Yeah. Yeah. AI. Every time you mention AI, you’re supposed to take a drink. It’s like the drinking game here. And it was last year and the year before. Um, but yes, all this data gets into AI because we’re talking about so much data that it’s really hard to parse it and understand it without having something that helps you. So, a few years ago, we started doing that with machine learning. uh but now it’s more about AI feeding all that data to AI and having it parse down the data do things like triage incidents for us so that we can understand what the real issue is because we get outage information from so many sources. It’s really great when it can say there’s a carrier outage here that’s causing all these subtending things or another use case would be a power outage where we might get a whole bunch of alerts from one site and we’ll have people running around like crazy trying to figure out what the problem is when really it’s it’s just power outage and of course we’re going to lose everything, right? So AI is really helpful to triage and understand and filter through all the data that we get. [Music]