New observability platform shows need for AI visibility

Observe and report—now with machine learning and automation.

Data platform Splunk, which uses AI to facilitate operations and security, plans to use technology from its parent company Cisco’s new acquisition of Galileo Technologies to give IT professionals more visibility into their tech stack and internal processes. Galileo produces an AI observability platform that monitors traffic and builds datasets from “synthetic, development, and live production data.”

Look. Visibility is an increasingly important concern for IT pros seeking to better observe their environments, particularly in hybridized systems. Raghu Nandakumara, VP of industry strategy at Illumio, told IT Brew in March that attackers are always looking for inconsistencies in monitoring.

“You want to have that consistent view so that you can then understand your risks in a consistent manner and address them,” Nandakumara said.

The big question facing Splunk is how to integrate its existing AI framework with the new observability tools. As IT Brew covered in September, Splunk integrated agentic AI into its systems last year, specifically its Splunk Enterprise Security tool suite.

The hope was that the company could blend the speed and efficiency of agentic AI with human control, Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM of the Splunk Business Unit, told us at the time.

“You need to provide a high degree of autonomy—a high degree of agentic is another way of saying it—autonomous solutions that can go on your behalf and do things fast, rapidly respond and all that,” Hathi said. “But human control is super important; you need to have oversight of what’s going on.”

Easy does it. Analysts like Steve Koelpin, CVS Health principal AI observability engineer, want to see how Splunk’s new system works before passing judgement. Best-case scenario, he told TechTarget, is that you forget it’s there, which may be easier said than done: “The real question for practitioners is execution: Can Cisco make Galileo native to the Splunk workflow, or does it become another pane of glass nobody wants to manage?”