Monitoring facilities with differing applications
You work in operations for a nationwide clothing rental service. You're faced with a number of challenges:
- Hundreds of nationwide facilities with diverse applications and network infrastructure that create silos and visibility gaps
- Limited ability to proactively detect performance degradation and network bottlenecks
Your primary business goals are real‑time monitoring, faster incident response, and improved uptime across the operational footprint.
Prerequisites
Data
Software
- Splunk ITSI
- Cisco Meraki Platform
- Cisco Meraki MT Sensors
- Cisco Meraki Add-on for Splunk
How to use Splunk + Cisco integrated software for this use case
Due to the variety of hardware and software solutions involved in this use case, providing an exhaustive step-by-step guide for setting up all of these tools isn’t feasible in a single article. Instead, this article offers high-level overviews and practical examples, with links to more detailed documentation and support. We recommend using Splunk and Cisco Education resources to learn more about each product listed above. For personalized assistance, consider engaging with Splunk and Cisco Professional Services.
The next two sections provide an overview of what a real Cisco customer achieved through integrating all the products listed above:
Recommended solutions
- Splunk ITSI: Make ITSI the single source of truth by collecting and centralized all logs from Cisco infrastructure. Use real-time view dashboards that include maps, uptime, and availability to replace siloed tools and fill visibility gaps. Use ITSI to proactively detect performance degradation, network bottlenecks, and anomalies.
- Meraki Platform: Use the Cisco Meraki Add-on to collect information from wireless and MT sensors regarding environmental monitoring, device health, and reporting, and then send it to ITSI. ITSI supports all Meraki products, so network and security context information can be sent from any access point.
Possible outcomes
- Faster resolution: Up to three times faster detection of network issues.
- Better customer experience: Reduce both physical point-of-sale and app errors.
- Personalized IT: Single source of truth with customized dashboards for key personas, such as IT Ops, SecOps, NetOps, operations leadership, and site managers.
Additional resources
Now that you have an idea of how Splunk and Cisco products work together to improve your retail operations, watch the full .Conf25 Talk, Cisco + Splunk Product Integrations. In the talk, you'll see a more complete overview of Splunk and Cisco product integrations, more use cases, and an introduction to the Cisco Enterprise Networking for Splunk Platform.
In addition, you might find these Splunk resources helpful:
- Cisco Documentation: Getting Started with Meraki
- Cisco Documentation: Meraki MT Sensors
- Splunkbase: List of Cisco-supported apps