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 ...