How Cisco Uses Splunk To Mitigate Major Incidents and Network Outages

A Sneak Peek at One of Cisco Live 2026’s Most Anticipated Center Stage Sessions

Every IT professional knows the feeling—your phone buzzes in the middle of the night, and you can just feel a major incident unfolding. You dial into a bridge call, half-asleep, staring at a cascade of alerts across multiple disconnected dashboards. Nobody can agree on where the problem really started.

Why should this session be at the top of your must-attend list? Because this isn't a vendor pitch. This is a peer-to-peer conversation from a team that has been exactly where you are, and these speakers want to share what they’ve learned to help you avoid the same pitfalls.

For Cisco IT, Disruption Isn’t an Option

For Cisco’s internal IT team, the margin for error is razor-thin, and the cost of downtime is high. They manage complex enterprise IT environments that span 86,000 employees, more than 100,000 IT-managed endpoints, 90 countries, and 5.6 million IP addresses.

But, with a lot of strategic thinking and effort, something changed. At Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, the team behind that transformation is taking the Center Stage (CENOBS-1500) to tell you exactly how they did it. The importance of shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention is the single most important concept any IT or DevOps leader can take back to their organization from Cisco Live 2026.

Cisco IT Cut Major Network Outages to Zero in the Past 18 Months

Is Cisco IT required to use products from Splunk, a Cisco Company? Nope. Like many organizations, they use a variety of best-of-breed products along with tools they build themselves.

Cisco operates at a scale that rivals some of the world's largest enterprises. So, when Cisco's own IT team says that Splunk helped them eliminate major network outages entirely and reduce major incidents by 25% in just 18 months, that's not a marketing claim. That's a point proven in production.

For Ines Thornburg, representing Splunk's Customer Experience team on stage alongside Cisco IT leaders Justin Waite and Ryan Smalley, this Center Stage session (CENOBS-1500) represents something deeply meaningful.

"This is the kind of story that reminds you why the work matters," said Thornburg. "Cisco IT operates at an extraordinary scale and complexity. Seeing what this team has accomplished, not just with the technology, but with how we’ve transformed the team’s culture and day-to-day work is genuinely inspiring. I can't wait to share it with the Cisco Live audience."

For Justin Waite and the Cisco IT team, Cisco Live is a rare opportunity to be radically transparent with their peers who are living through the same challenges. "We've been in the weeds on this for years," Waite said. "If we can save another team from even one 2 AM bridge call, it's worth it."

The One Thing You’ll Take Away: Unified Observability Based on Trusted Data

Here it is, and we're not burying it: unified observability isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation for everything—digital resilience, AI adoption and trust, security, cost optimization, and even team culture.

Cisco IT's journey wasn't just the adoption of Splunk technology. It was a strategic rethinking of how data flows, how teams collaborate, and how AI can work in the real world when it's built on a strong foundation of observability. Before this transformation, siloed tools, fragmented data, and alert fatigue made it nearly impossible to see problems coming, let alone stop them.

After deploying Splunk as the centralized platform for telemetry data across network, infrastructure, applications, and services—integrated with Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Observability Cloud, AppDynamics, and Cisco ThousandEyes for deep network visibility—everything changed. Detection got faster, responses got smarter, and the team went from drowning in tickets to driving meaningful innovation.

 

Why You Should Be in the Room

Whether you're an IT operations leader grappling with alert fatigue, a network engineer trying to get end-to-end visibility, an SRE tasked with improving MTTD and MTTR, or an IT executive making decisions about AI readiness and platform consolidation, this session speaks directly to your world.

You'll hear an honest account of what didn't work, what the turning point looked like, and the hard-won lessons that came from 18 months of real-world implementation. You'll see a practical demo of proactive incident prevention in action. And, you'll walk away with key takeaways that you can bring back to your team on when you get back to the office.

There's a cultural thread running through this story that connects the people with the technology. One of the most compelling parts of Cisco IT's transformation is what happened to the people, and how the shift to unified observability improved the team’s daily quality of life.

“We transformed our people from ticket-closers with wrenches into product managers solving complex problems. Job satisfaction has skyrocketed,” Justin told us. That part of the story alone is worth the price of admission.

Session Details and More to Explore

Session: [CENOBS-1500] Using Splunk to Reduce Major Incidents by 25% and Network Outages to Zero: A Cisco Case Study: Wednesday, June 3rd (4:30 – 5:00 PM PDT)

Speakers:

• Justin Waite (VP, DevTools & Release Engineering, Cisco)
• Ines Thornburg (Director, Splunk, Customer Experience, Cisco)
• Ryan Smalley (Specialist, Splunk Customer Success, Cisco)

After the session, the conversation doesn't have to stop there. Cisco Live 2026 offers numerous ways to go deeper and learn more about everything you'll hear on stage:

• Visit the Cisco World of Solutions showcase to see the Pulse Wall, simulating the flow of data through Splunk from network issue to solution. You’ll also find 11 hands-on demos related to unified observability and Splunk in the Digital Resilience and AI-ready Data Centers areas of the showcase.
• Book a Meet the Engineer session to have a one-on-one conversation with Splunk and Cisco experts.
• Explore the On-Demand Library at CiscoLive.com/on-demand for additional sessions from past Cisco Live events so you can watch at your own pace after the show.
• Connect with the speakers directly via the Cisco Events app and Webex app. The session space will be moderated through June 13, 2026, so you can keep the dialogue going long after the session ends.

The Bottom Line

The story you'll hear in this center stage session (CENOBS-1500) is ultimately about something every IT leader is chasing right now: the confidence that comes from actually knowing and trusting what's happening in your environment, especially in the AI era. Operational intelligence needs to help you identify problems before your customers feel it, before your executives ask about it, and long before that 2 AM phone call.

Cisco IT built that confidence with Splunk. And, at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, they're going to show you how. We'll see you there!