The Visibility Gap: Hybrid Networks and IT Services

[Connor_Tye]

The most forward thinking enterprises among us see their network as much more than infrastructure – it's their critical enabler of application performance, superior user experiences, business growth, and digital resilience. This has led to evolving network architectures, with many organizations managing a mix of traditional enterprise networks, and cloud-managed infrastructure like Catalyst Center and Meraki. The more you enable, the more you introduce data silos that make it harder to quickly troubleshoot and restore services when issues happen. 

To help teams close that gap, we’re excited to introduce the Splunk ITSI Content Pack for Enterprise Networking, a unified solution that brings together network telemetry from both Cisco Catalyst Center and Cisco Meraki into Splunk ITSI. With out-of-the-box dashboards, entity integrations, and correlation logic, the content pack makes it easier to identify if the slowness in application or degraded user experience is due to the underlying networks or bad application code – all in the context of your most critical IT and business services.

Curious what’s included? Lets take a closer look: 

• Catalyst Center visibility: Device, interface, status metrics, and alerts from your traditional enterprise network infrastructure.
  
  
• Meraki coverage: Health and alert data from Meraki-managed switches, gateways, and access points.
  
  
• IT service & business KPI correlation: Contextual insights that connect network telemetry with service and business performance data, so you know what’s actually impacted, and why.
  
  

Real-world Use Cases

Let's look at some examples of how enterprises are already using Splunk to respond faster, smarter, and in a way that shows how hybrid network visibility drives impact when it matters the most: 

• Business Service Disruption: A high error rate on a Catalyst Center interface may not be a top priority for NetOps teams, or could go unnoticed by ITOps teams — until customers start reporting slowness in your ecommerce site. With correlated visibility, ITSI can alert both teams, not just on the network issue, but also the downstream impact on service and business KPIs.
  
  
• Retail Revenue Risk: When an access point goes offline in a store, it’s not just a wireless problem — it’s potentially a broken Point-of-Sale system. Glass tables make it easier for all stakeholders to spot the same disconnect, see which branch is impacted, and prioritize remediation based on impact to the business.
  
  
• SLA Violations: Fluctuations in Meraki-managed WAN gateways can degrade cloud application access for support agents and possibly threaten SLA performance. By tying this to incident timelines and IT service health scores, ITOps teams can restore operations before SLOs/SLAs are breached.

Visibility Beyond the Gap

Beyond visibility, what’s the real value for users and line of service leaders? With the new content pack, network issues are no longer isolated blips — they’re visible, prioritized, and contextualized alongside the services and users they affect. That means:

• Faster root cause identification, mean-time-to-innocence, and remediation.
  
  
• Reduced alert and triage fatigue through more intelligent correlation.
  
  
• Improved MTTR with fewer handoffs between ITOps and NetOps teams.
  
  
• Better SLOs/SLAs, customer experience, and business continuity.

Enterprise networks are evolving, and Splunk is evolving with them. Whether you’re managing thousands of Catalyst Center switches or a rapidly scaling Meraki footprint, our latest innovations ensure that your network doesn’t ever become a black box – only part of a cohesive observability strategy. Because when your network and service data speak the same language, your teams can move faster, and smarter.