Cisco looses Splunk to probe its growing agentic menagerie • The Register

Cisco is on observe to ship its unified administration device Cloud Management later in 2026, however whereas its customers anticipate that second it’s pumping out loads extra agentic instruments to handle their networks – and ensure brokers behave.

The job of agentic babysitter goes to a brand new AI Agent Monitoring device for Splunk’s Observability Cloud. We’re instructed it visualizes agent workflows and might observe the efficiency, price, high quality, and conduct of LLM and agentic functions. Splunkers can take it for a spin two weeks from now.

Cisco will combine the brand new Splunk device with AI Protection, the suite it introduced final yr, which makes positive LLMs don’t misbehave or create dangers, scans for AI-powered functions, governs their conduct with guardrails, and sniffs out unauthorized or surprising LLM-powered applications to make sure they’ll’t escape coverage and supervision.

The networking big made AI Protection usually obtainable this week and celebrated that milestone by including further capabilities, together with the power to catalog of Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) servers an enterprise makes use of in-house and elsewhere. Once more the plan right here helps customers to identify programs that may have escaped their insurance policies and AI guardrails.

Cisco additionally added automated red-teaming instruments to check the safety of fashions and related infrastructure. Switchzilla designed this one to run on prem so queries and prompts don’t have to go away the constructing, however it may well nonetheless goal off-prem assets.

And in a nod to the need of complying with older operational fashions, Cisco has mapped AI Protection to AI frameworks from NIST, OWASP, and MITRE.

The corporate has additionally introduced loads extra brokers to automate campus, department, and industrial networks. By mid-year, Cisco will provide autonomous troubleshooting, steady optimization that notices and fixes poor community efficiency, plus instruments to make sure that no matter an agent recommends doesn’t go dangerously past operational baselines. Cisco additionally guarantees the power to create agentic workflows.

Firewall customers will get proactive suggestions for brand spanking new zero belief controls, and brokers to deploy them for those who belief a machine to do the job.

For now, Cisco will make these brokers and instruments obtainable in its AI Canvas – its agentic community administration interface. However the firm plans to unify that device, and its different administration instruments, right into a single providing referred to as Cloud Management.

Cisco final yr introduced the unification of its Meraki and Catalyst dashboards, plus the power to handle each NX-OS and ACI materials with the Nexus Dashboard. The Register attended that announcement, which produced spontaneous cheers from the Cisco Reside USA crowd.

That constructive response suggests Cloud Management will discover an enthusiastic viewers as soon as it debuts, which we’re instructed will likely be deep into 2026. We’ll see whether or not that almost all receptive viewers is execs who see an opportunity to chop prices, or networking professionals freed of scutwork. ®