Cisco Cloud Observability Operators

As part of the monitoring team called ESOC, Enterprise Security Ops, we use Splunk Observability Cloud to have a bird's eye view on all the applications and infrastructure, observing how they connect with each other and how workflows among them occur. When we detect incidents, we deep dive into Splunk Observability Cloud to see the flow of the signals and identify possible connection issues with other systems they're connected to. We have been using Splunk Observability Cloud extensively these days.

At Progressive Insurance, we have a huge claims presence where the applications related to claims are high priority. Recently, we encountered an issue with claims documentation, which resulted in disruptions that affected applications using documentation, especially claims documentation, causing them to struggle. During this time, Splunk Observability Cloud was incredibly helpful as we drilled down into root cause analysis to assist those application teams in identifying what could have gone wrong—whether it was API calls, network issues, or pods being down. It took some time, but Splunk Observability Cloud really facilitated our investigation.

Seeing the whole signal flow aspect was really beneficial. We could visualize how the signals moved from one module to another, even with inferred systems, and that visibility assisted us in our analysis significantly.

One great feature of Splunk Observability Cloud is how it transitions from monitoring to observability. While monitoring involves looking at potential issues and health checks, observability allows us to view the system more from a signal flow perspective, and the visuals are much better. I can see the system clearly represented in front of me, allowing for better visualization and flow assessment. I hope to benefit even more from this at the conference.

An example would be how we analyze the interconnections between applications and pods, monitoring pod health and determining whether a pod is in a crash loop or just down, or if an application has an excessive number of pods down, which helps us present data more effectively.

I am continuously exploring more about it. Although I have been working with it for around two years, I am eager to learn more, especially with the incorporation of AI, which excites me about using Splunk Observability Cloud further.

I believe increased adoption is essential. While usage is steady now, the more application teams embrace it and avoid working in silos, the easier it will be to create a more cohesive structure.

We are relatively new to this, and I aim to explore further, especially during classes and sessions at the conference. I am thrilled about how AI is being incorporated to enhance dashboard functionality and visibility. Once we become more seasoned, we will grasp more about the necessary improvements.

Regarding the AI capabilities of Splunk Observability Cloud, I think its governance and security need much exploration. I am uncertain about what governance teams are doing within my company, but there are growing conversations about backdoor channels and misuse, emphasizing the necessity for strict guardrails and governance as key factors for adoption.

I have been using Splunk Observability Cloud for two years.

Splunk Observability Cloud is stable.

So far, its scalability at the user level has been good, but I am uncertain about the configuration or administrative level.

Customer support has been really good.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer support an eight.

Previously, we used AppDynamics and Splunk Enterprise. We have not fully switched yet, but we are growing toward observability.

Time saved is definitely a factor. While I do not decide on monetary matters within the company, I can confirm that there has definitely been a time-saving aspect.

I advise others looking into using Splunk Observability Cloud to practice more, explore extensively, and aim to customize as much as possible according to their needs. I would rate this review a seven out of ten.

My main use case for Splunk Observability Cloud is logging. For logging, I monitor applications across a Kubernetes cluster and Docker containers.

The best features Splunk Observability Cloud offers include the API access. API access has helped me in my day-to-day work by allowing easy integration. Splunk Observability Cloud has positively impacted my organization because we have become huge clients.

Splunk Observability Cloud has helped improve my operational performance and my company's resilience. For example, it has helped with security and video. Splunk Observability Cloud helped with security by providing visibility into tiling.

I think Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved by being cheaper.

I have been using Splunk Observability Cloud for less than a year.

Splunk Observability Cloud is stable.

Splunk Observability Cloud's scalability is great.

The customer support is good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support as a ten.

As far as I know, the organization has always used Splunk Observability Cloud, so I cannot say if we previously used a different solution.

I did not purchase Splunk Observability Cloud through the AWS Marketplace.

I do not have visibility into what changed after we started using Splunk Observability Cloud. I did not purchase Splunk Observability Cloud through the AWS Marketplace.

I have seen a return on investment, but that is outside my scope.

I am not the right person to share my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

I am unaware if my organization evaluated other options before choosing Splunk Observability Cloud.

Regarding Splunk Observability Cloud's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are excellent. Regarding Splunk Observability Cloud's AI capabilities, the accuracy and reliability of its output depend on how long it takes; the longer it takes, the better it is.

It is not important for my organization that Splunk Observability Cloud has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environments. Overall, I assess Splunk Observability Cloud as great; it is overall very good for helping my organization scale. I cannot answer if I have seen time to value with Splunk Observability Cloud. I think Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved by being cheaper.

I would rate this review as a five overall.

My main use case for Splunk Observability Cloud is for customer support.

Using Splunk Observability Cloud for customer support helps expedite my customer's needs and ensure that I have access to all the right data to answer questions quickly and effectively.

I have seen that Splunk Observability Cloud made a difference when it helped me with a critical customer workload when a part of their database was impacted by an event. I was able to quickly determine what was impacted and how to quickly isolate and do damage control. Thanks to Splunk Observability Cloud, I would not have been able to gather the information I needed so quickly.

The best features that Splunk Observability Cloud offers are all of the metrics and dashboards that are most important to myself and the management team.

What I appreciate about the metrics and dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud is that they're easy to configure and edit and give me access to all of the data that I need.

Splunk Observability Cloud has impacted my organization positively by allowing management access to the logs, dashboards, and metrics they need to operate a high functioning team and product.

The specific outcomes I've seen with Splunk Observability Cloud include faster response times and lower MTTR. Some of the specific improvements I've seen are in faster mean time to resolution and easier damage control during critical outages and failures.

Regarding how Splunk Observability Cloud can be improved, there are few opportunities for improvement, but perhaps one area of improvement is greater integration with partners and clearer ability to quickly gather the information I need to supercharge my AI workloads using Splunk Observability Cloud.

The customer support for Splunk Observability Cloud is thorough and gave me everything I needed to make sure I was well supported.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support for Splunk Observability Cloud a nine.

My experience with lowering the cost of unplanned digital downtime using Splunk Observability Cloud has been positive, as we've been able to lower our mean time to resolution and make sure that we are resilient and quickly recover from disasters.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Splunk Observability Cloud was very straightforward, and I felt supported the whole way through. There wasn't a moment in which I felt we could not get the information we needed on pricing and setup.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Splunk Observability Cloud is to take your time getting to know the product and make sure to get involved with the support team. Make sure that you feel comfortable adjusting what you need to adjust and have fun. I would rate this product a nine overall.

We just started implementing Splunk Observability Cloud in my company as an ongoing project.

Our main use case for Splunk Observability Cloud is for our digital team for our website healthpartners.com, and that's the reason we decided to bring in a unified monitoring platform instead of using different monitoring tools. We are working with other teams as well at the same time, bringing their metrics and traces into Splunk Observability Cloud from other monitoring tools.

The other use case that we're working on regarding Splunk Observability Cloud is synthetic monitoring, and right now, we have some legacy solutions that have been used for the health checks, browser tests, and API tests, which have been moved over from a different tool to Splunk Observability Cloud. There is also one team that I'm currently talking to where we have set up the health checks in a legacy way using REST API inputs on the heavy forwarder, and we are planning to move that to Splunk Observability Cloud as well.

In my opinion, the best features Splunk Observability Cloud offers are the dashboards and some of the alerting features that I appreciate. I have also just found out that they are adding the incidents feature, which is really interesting, and I would to know more about that as well in the alert section to group all the alerts in a single incident, so that is going to be great.

For the alerting features of Splunk Observability Cloud, right now, we have been setting detectors for all the synthetic monitoring tests that were set up and also some of the host metrics, and we are testing it out, notifying those alerts and sending them to the teams, and that has been helpful even for our team. For the dashboards, so far, there is one dashboard that was built for us, the gateway monitoring dashboard where we send metrics via the gateway, and when something happens on the gateway side, if there's a delay or if the metric stops streaming into Splunk Observability Cloud, we can check the dashboard, so I appreciate that feature too.

Regarding the features of Splunk Observability Cloud, maybe the fleet management is what I'm looking forward to, as I know that feature has been added recently and we are able to see the gateway collectors showing up on there. I am more interested to see how the OTel collectors or anything else show up in there, and how that can be useful for our team.

I don't think I've seen any missing features of Splunk Observability Cloud so far, as I'm still exploring it and learning as we work on the project, so I think it is going to be great.

I can't think of anything at this time, but the new incident feature is great, and I heard for the DB monitoring, there is something that is going to be added in Splunk Observability Cloud where we can add custom attributes in there, which might be helpful in the future.

Splunk Observability Cloud is stable in my experience so far.

I cannot say with certainty at this time regarding Splunk Observability Cloud's scalability, as we're still in the middle of the project, so I don't know how scalable this is. Right now, there's one task that I'm working on to bring in the SQL servers for DB monitoring into Splunk Observability Cloud, and right now, we don't have licensing for it, so we are working on getting the licensing. I would love to see once we have those metrics into Splunk Observability Cloud, how that is going to work and how scalable it is.

I did interact with Splunk Observability Cloud's customer support, and it is working and is good so far.

There are multiple different tools that have been used in my company; it's not just one. We have Foglight, Prometheus, Grafana, and we are moving towards having a unified monitoring tool or unified solution, which is the reason for the switch or migrating over.

I was not involved in any discussions about pricing, setup cost, or licensing for Splunk Observability Cloud, so I have very minimal experience with that.

I haven't seen any return on investment yet, but I do definitely expect to see ROI soon, once we bring in everything and reduce workload.

I was not involved in any discussions about pricing, setup cost, or licensing for Splunk Observability Cloud, so I have very minimal experience with that.

I am not sure if any other options or proofs of concept have been done before choosing Splunk Observability Cloud, as it was a higher-ups decision to go with it.

I have heard from one of the teams when they set up the synthetic monitoring, so they gave really positive feedback to us, which was good. The other teams, the problems they had with the other monitoring tools, I feel have been solved with Splunk Observability Cloud to some extent, so that is going well so far.

I think one of the issues that they had was with the alerting from their tool, and there is this one person who works with the developer teams and gathers all the information regarding the browser tests and API tests. He sets it up for the alerting; right now, we have the ServiceNow webhook integration that was set up to notify or generate the ServiceNow incident, and the way it was set up in Splunk Observability Cloud is that whenever the incident clears itself, it will notify the team, but it won't close the ticket out, so they can take a look and have human eyes on it before they close it out, and that was positive feedback that was given to me.

Regarding Splunk Observability Cloud's AI capabilities, we haven't had the AI capabilities enabled for our instance yet, so we have not had the AI assistant or any other features, but I'm looking forward to learning more or understanding the AI capabilities once we deep dive into the project.

For others looking into using Splunk Observability Cloud, I would first recommend taking a basic education course; if it is a user, maybe a free course or a basic course to understand how Splunk Observability Cloud works and what features are inside it. If it is a power user or admin, I think we need to provide the documentation to the users on how easily they can log in, go between the features, and understand where they can find the dashboards, alerting, metrics, and so on.

I'm looking forward to implementing, completing the project, and starting to use it, as well as our users starting to use Splunk Observability Cloud soon. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.