The Performance Playbook: Why Business Context Is the Key to Customer-Centric Visibility

Modern enterprises don’t just run on applications; they run on digital business processes. Checkout, order fulfillment, claims processing, payments, and loan approvals aren’t just backend workflows. They are the revenue engines and customer experiences that define your business.

Yet most observability tools still measure success in system terms: uptime, latency, CPU utilization. They can tell you when a service is slow, but not which business process is affected, how much the issue is costing you, or which customers are feeling the impact. Teams need to know whether problems are hitting mobile users, specific browsers, key regions, or high-value segments — because not all incidents carry the same business risk.

As digital ecosystems grow more complex, the differentiator isn’t visibility alone; it’s context. Observability without business context is just noise, keeping teams focused on symptoms instead of impact. What matters is understanding what your customers care about so you can act on what truly matters to them.

Flying Blind Is No Fun

Traditional observability approaches were designed for systems, not services. Today, many teams chase anomalies across hundreds of microservices without understanding which business workflows those systems actually support.

The result: flying blind and firefighting in the dark.

• Frontline teams triage alerts without understanding business impact.
• Engineers lose time on non-critical issues while revenue-driving processes degrade.
• Executives see outages reported in technical terms rather than customer or financial outcomes.

Across the industry, we see a common limitation. Many observability tools stop at system health. They provide excellent telemetry but lack the contextual understanding of how those signals translate to business performance. Some platforms offer basic visibility into business flows, but only through rigid, predefined templates. Others focus heavily on technical elements — golden signals and traces — but struggle to group services into higher-order business journeys. And open frameworks often require teams to manually stitch together dashboards and plugins just to simulate process-level visibility.

The bottom line: most tools can tell you what’s broken, but not what it means for your business.

The New Play: Bringing Business Context to Observability

At Splunk, we’ve noodled on the gaps to take a fundamentally different approach to observability. While simplifying critical business processes is imperative, it is equally important for infrastructure and applications, so you can see the holistic picture across your entire digital ecosystem. We want our customers to understand and solve issues that impact your entire business – your customers, your revenue, and brand.

With Splunk Observability, you can start from the top in an executive dashboard or workflow view showing the health of a key business service like checkout, payment processing, or claims. From there, you can trace performance degradations all the way down to the exact business process, app dependency, or line of code responsible.

Splunk unifies metrics, traces, logs, real-user data, and business KPIs in one connected experience. You can easily enrich telemetry with business context, linking technical performance to outcomes such as revenue, conversions, or customer satisfaction, giving every team — from engineering to operations to executives — the clarity to focus on what truly matters.

Now, as part of Cisco, Splunk extends that visibility even further by integrating with Cisco’s broad networking and security ecosystem. Data from ThousandEyes, Meraki, Catalyst, and other Cisco technologies provides deep, correlated insight into network performance and digital experience. Together, Splunk and Cisco offer unparalleled context across every layer of the digital stack, from the user’s device and network path to the cloud service and backend application. This gives teams the ability to see, understand, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Add business context to telemetry: correlate technical signals with KPIs to understand which issues have the greatest business impact.
• Prioritize what matters most: instantly identify which incidents affect high-value customers, specific stores or regions, or critical marketing campaigns.
• Visualize end-to-end workflows: see how services, apps, and infrastructure connect across cloud, hybrid, and third-party environments, including next-gen AI and SaaS platforms.
• Track flexible, business-defined custom metrics: measure what your business cares about most, with clear, usage-based options that scale to your needs.

Whether through curated business journeys, KPI-based dashboards, or integrated insights from Cisco’s portfolio, we’re different (in a good way) from other solutions in that only Splunk provides a complete, connected understanding of how technical performance drives business outcomes. This is how organizations move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, context-driven decision-making — and how observability becomes a true engine of business performance.

Delivering Outcomes at Scale

Across industries, leading organizations are using Splunk to connect technical performance with business outcomes, and the results speak for themselves. Each of these leaders has moved beyond traditional monitoring toward something more powerful: operational decisions informed by business context.

• Progressive Insurance uses Splunk Observability to understand how system performance affects claims workflows. With 15 million daily web requests and full-fidelity visibility into 8 million traces, Progressive resolves issues before they slow down claims processing — protecting customer experience and avoiding millions in potential downtime.
• Papa Johns uses Splunk to anchor digital operations around the metrics that matter: order volume, store performance, and customer experience. With visibility across 5,500+ stores, teams can spot service degradation in real time and fix release issues the same day — keeping digital ordering reliable for a business where 90% of sales happen online.
• 2xConnect relies on business-context dashboards to understand how technical issues impact call-center productivity and revenue conversion. With Splunk, they cut downtime by 60%, maintained 100% uptime during a major cloud migration, and improved conversion rates by 20% after uncovering a hidden application bug surfaced through business-aligned insights.
• NJIT links service health directly to student and faculty outcomes. With KPI-driven dashboards showing the real impact of incidents on registration, finance, and learning systems, NJIT cut MTTD and MTTR by double digits and maintained 99.99% availability during critical academic periods.

Insights: Making Observability a Business Discipline

For CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders, the next era of observability isn’t about keeping systems up. It’s about keeping the business performing.

Splunk helps you connect the dots, from executive dashboards to lines of code, so your teams can see, understand, and act on what truly drives your business.

Because in a world where every second of downtime affects revenue and reputation, business context isn’t a feature. It’s a leadership imperative.