It’s great to be back at another action and innovation-packed Cisco Live 2024. Continuing our tradition of posting Cisco Live announcements and highlights (catch Cisco Live 2023 Highlights here), I am putting together my thoughts and perspective on the Top-10 Cisco Live 2024 Announcements and Highlights. This year, I also had the pleasure of representing CloudFabrix at the event, which helped gain deeper insights on customer needs and expectations on Observability, Asset Insights and AIOps.

A large percentage of enterprises are redefining their businesses around hybrid cloud ecosystems. The benefits include increased scalability and flexibility, improved collaboration, and cost efficiency. Microsoft Azure, one of the leading cloud computing platforms with a 23% market share in 2023, plays a key role in enabling hybrid cloud environments for organizations.

The recent Microsoft Azure outage had a profound impact, disrupted services for countless businesses and individuals around the globe, and exposed the risks of relying exclusively on cloud solutions. This incident, triggered by a mix of technical failures and unexpected complications, resulted in substantial downtime, access issues, and operational interruptions across multiple industries.

Observability provides many business benefits, but comes with costs as well. Once the (not-insignificant) work of picking a platform, taking an inventory of your applications and infrastructure, and getting buyin from leadership (both from the business and engineering sides of the house) is done, you then have to actually instrument your applications to emit data, and build the data pipeline that sends that data to your observability system.

Over the past few months, we introduced several new features and capabilities. While we released larger product updates like Trace Explorer, Insights modules, and our JavaScript V8 SDK (to name a few), it’s the smaller, iterative improvements that really make a big difference in your debugging workflow. Let’s dive into 8 recent updates that you should know about.

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud powered with AI capabilities to enhance efficiency, scalability and innovation. Splunk, a leader in security and data observability, has been at the forefront of this transformation.

We’re excited to share some big updates and enhancements that underscore our dedication to innovation and efficiency. Check out our new Carbon Footprint Reporting add-on feature, a sleek dark mode GUI theme, and major improvements to Business Entity tracking and Dashboard Widgets. Plus, we’ve added new custom components for better peripheral logging and expanded firmware update support for Panduit Gen6 rack PDU products.

Developers are expensive to hire, and it takes time to get new hires up to speed. Getting the most out of developers and retaining them should be a priority for any organization. Fortunately, developers like creating new stuff, and organizations want new functionality. Therefore, if there was a way of minimizing the time spent fixing bugs, the new feature backlog would be reduced, and happy developers would stay around.

DevOps is now the norm for virtually every IT team in every sector. By integrating and automating software development processes, it removes laborious, manual tasks and enables teams to deliver value to end users faster and more efficiently.