Under the Hood of Cisco IT

Do you know which technology is under the hood of Cisco IT?

Do you know what Cisco uses to monitor the health of 70+ of their apps and to respond to security incidents?

We bring you the answers straight from the horse’s mouth.

At the recent SplunkLive! SF and in front of a packed room, Robert Novak, Follow @gallifreyan, Quinn Zuo and Ruby Chiang of the Cisco IT team, Follow @ciscoit, uncovered the mystery and gave us a good look under the hood.  They showed how Splunk powers their operations and solves some of their critical IT challenges.

.@ciscoDC and @splunk session | A packed room with lots of great questions from the audience #ciscoUCS #SplunkLive pic.twitter.com/IEnPoOhb3G

— Renee Yao (@ReneeYao1) July 15, 2015

Splunk for Cisco IT

• Deployed on Cisco UCS servers, Splunk indexes multiple terabytes per day of machine data from Cisco’s production systems across 7 global data centers.
• Cisco IT team built an operations center based on Splunk Enterprise and several Splunk Apps for IT/Ops and Security.
• Cisco relies on Splunk for many use cases, including:
  • Real-time monitoring of IT infrastructure and services
  • Detection of and response to security incidents
  • Business analytics (marketing campaigns activity)

and the results are in

The Cisco IT team revealed the benefits they obtained from Splunk

• 50% reduction in high priority issues due to pro-active monitoring
• 90% improvement in root cause analysis time: minutes rather than hours
• As a result of using Splunk for 5+ years, Cisco IT was able to replace three aging siloed systems.

As Cisco leveraged Splunk beyond IT use cases, daily search volume increased by 846% within a year.

Full presentation:

In addition, check out the published success story on how Cisco IT uses Splunk on Cisco UCS for IT Operations with details on the Splunk-based solution implemented by Cisco IT and the lessons learned.

Splunk on Cisco UCS

During their presentation, the Cisco IT team also described how their environment is supported by a high performance, highly scalable Cisco UCS infrastructure. UCS is an essential platform for central management of big data infrastructure. Since Splunk scales from a single system to a large scale distributed deployment, it is the perfect solution for operational intelligence on top of UCS.

Cisco has endorsed Splunk as a key technology partner for their UCS platform. Here is a highlight of key assets on the Splunk-UCS integration

• A new 260+ page Cisco Validated Design with step-by-step deployment guidance from bare metal to a distributed Splunk Enterprise on Cisco UCS environment
• The Splunk Add-on for Cisco UCS for collection and correlation of UCS data (fault, inventory, and performance)
• Solution brief: Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data with Splunk Enterprise

We thank the Cisco IT team for joining us at SplunkLive! and for the great lively session.

Wissam

Follow @wissamaa

Follow @splunk
 
Wissam Ali-Ahmad
Senior Solutions Architect, Global Strategic Alliances
Splunk Inc.