A Business & Competitive Edge:
Cisco + Splunk + AppDynamics
Author: Bhuvnesh Yadav
Release Date: 13/05/2025
So before we dive into how Splunk and AppDynamics are coming together under Cisco’s umbrella, let me quickly walk you through what these platforms actually do.
AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired back in January 2017, is an industry-leading Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution. It’s designed to give IT and business teams full-stack observability — meaning visibility across applications, infrastructure, and user experience. It uses AI-driven analytics and automation to monitor application health, detect anomalies, and reduce downtime. In short, AppDynamics helps ensure apps perform reliably, incidents are resolved quickly, and everything stays aligned with business goals.
Some of AppDynamics’ key strengths include:
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
• Infrastructure and Server Monitoring
• Business Transaction Monitoring
• End-User and Synthetic Monitoring
• AI-Powered Anomaly Detection
Now, let’s talk about Splunk, which Cisco acquired more recently — in March 2024. Splunk is a powerful enterprise-grade platform for log analysis, real-time observability, and security operations (SIEM). Whether you’re using it on-prem or as a SaaS solution, Splunk gives you deep insights across your IT infrastructure, applications, and security layers. It also has specialized modules like Splunk SOAR for automated security operations and Splunk ITSI for AIOps and intelligent incident management.
So here’s where it gets exciting...
The Future of Monitoring and Observability
With both Splunk and AppDynamics now under Cisco — and AppDynamics being rebranded as Splunk AppDynamics — we’re entering a whole new era of unified observability.
This combination creates a one-stop observability solution that spans everything from application performance to network health, infrastructure issues, and security threats. Clients and business users can now get end-to-end visibility across their applications, infrastructure, databases, and more — whether it’s a 3-tier app, a hybrid cloud setup, or a complex micro-services environment.
Imagine combining:
• Splunk’s strength in log and event monitoring,
• AppDynamics’ deep APM capabilities and AI-driven root cause analysis,
• And Cisco’s network and security telemetry.
It’s not just a monitoring toolset — it’s a platform that connects IT Ops, Network, Security, and Application teams all in one place. Everyone’s looking at the same data, the same dashboards, the same alerts — which means faster resolution, fewer silos, and better collaboration.
What This Means for the Business
With Splunk AppDynamics, we’re now able to cover:
• End-to-end customer journeys
• Real-time business transaction monitoring
• Identification of pain points like app slowdowns, network latency, DB bottlenecks, and customer dropouts
• AI-driven insights and automated recommendations for faster remediation
• Support for OpenTelemetry (OTel) — allowing trace data from modern cloud-native apps to be ingested and correlated easily
In short, observability is no longer a luxury — it's a core requirement for any business that wants to stay competitive. It helps you detect issues early, solve them fast, and ensure your systems are reliable, scalable, and aligned with business goals.
"In the digital era, user experience defines business success. Observability and monitoring aren’t just nice to have — they’re essential.
Splunk and AppDynamics don’t just help detect issues — they help fix them before your customers ever notice."
With Cisco bringing these platforms together, this trio is set to reshape the future of monitoring and observability. For IT leaders, it’s honestly like a dream solution: unified, intelligent, and built for the complexities of modern enterprise environments.
Somerford is an Elite Partner with Splunk with a practice of SC/DV Cleared Professional Services Consultants with skills and expertise in all of Splunk. Bhuvnesh has many years of industry experience of using and implementing AppDynamics and if you would like any help or support with AppD or any part of Splunk, please reach out to us here.
