Cisco looses Splunk to probe and tame its growing agentic menagerie
Cisco is on track to deliver its unified management tool Cloud Control later in 2026, but while its users wait for that moment it’s pumping out plenty more agentic tools to manage their networks – and make sure agents behave.
The job of agentic babysitter goes to a new AI Agent Monitoring tool for Splunk’s Observability Cloud. We’re told it visualizes agent workflows and can track the performance, cost, quality, and behavior of LLM and agentic applications. Splunkers can take it for a spin two weeks from now.
Cisco will integrate the new Splunk tool with AI Defense, the suite it announced last year, which makes sure LLMs don’t misbehave or create risks, scans for AI-powered applications, governs their behavior with guardrails, and sniffs out unauthorized or unexpected LLM-powered programs to ensure they can’t escape policy and supervision.
The networking giant made AI Defense generally available this week and celebrated that milestone by adding extra capabilities, including the ability to catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers an enterprise uses in-house and elsewhere. Again the plan here is helping users to spot systems that might have escaped their policies and AI guardrails.
Cisco also added automated red-teaming tools to test the security of models and associated infrastructure. Switchzilla designed this one to run on prem so queries and prompts don’t have to leave the building, but it can still target off-prem resources.
And in a nod to the necessity of complying with older operational models, Cisco has mapped AI Defense to AI frameworks from NIST, OWASP, and MITRE.
The company has also announced plenty more agents to automate campus, branch, and industrial networks. By mid-year, Cisco will offer autonomous troubleshooting, continuous optimization that notices and fixes poor network performance, plus tools to ensure that whatever an agent recommends doesn’t go dangerously beyond operational baselines. Cisco also promises the ability to create agentic workflows.
Firewall users will get proactive recommendations for new zero trust controls, and agents to deploy them if you trust a machine to do the job.
For now, Cisco will make these agents and tools available in its AI Canvas – its agentic network management interface. But the company plans to unify that tool, and its other management tools, into a single offering called Cloud Control.
Cisco last year announced the unification of its Meraki and Catalyst dashboards, plus the ability to manage both NX-OS and ACI fabrics with the Nexus Dashboard. The Register attended that announcement, which produced spontaneous cheers from the Cisco Live USA crowd.
That positive reaction suggests Cloud Control will find an enthusiastic audience once it debuts, which we’re told will be deep into 2026. We'll see whether that most receptive audience is execs who see a chance to cut costs, or networking pros freed of scutwork. ®
