As enterprise reliance on information technology systems continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the state of a network’s health at any given time becomes critical to routine functioning of the business. Are there frequent hiccups (downtime), feelings of sluggishness (latency), or as in the nightmare scenario — is there a serious disease (computer virus)?

The analogy of the computer infrastructure as a living, breathing entity is not that far from reality, and IT administrators are increasingly paying close attention to network health not just from the standpoint of curing ills, but also preventing them from occurring in the first place. That’s part of the story behind Cisco Systems Inc.’s Network Optimization Service, which focuses on taking the necessary steps with customers to prevent the IT patient from wandering into harm’s way.

“Network Optimization Service is all about proactive, optimizing an existing network so you make sure you’re never getting to a place where you end up having to remediate something,” said Altaf Karim (pictured), analytics services innovation lead at Cisco Systems. “It’s really about fine-tuning a well-oiled machine to make sure you’re getting the most out of your IT investment.”

Karim paid a visit to the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk.conf2017 event in Washington, D.C.. He spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), discussing the role of data in assessing system health and how Splunk’s machine learning tool helps Cisco build baseline data for network performance. (* Disclosure below.)

Building KPIs and identifying outcomes

To optimize network performance, Cisco’s consultants begin by working with customers to identify the kinds of business outcomes they want to achieve. These might include high system availability or improved network performance.

Because data plays a significant role in assessing system health, Cisco consultants are increasingly involved in identifying the right key performance indicators to tell the whole story, and Splunk supports this effort.

“We have consultants who are world-class leading experts in networking, but we’re also training them and asking them to walk a little bit in the shoes of data analysts,” Karim explained. “Splunk is a pretty easy platform for them to learn and start to make an impact by creating custom applications, KPIs and metrics for customers.”

Machine learning is also becoming more of a factor in network evaluation. Splunk recently released a Machine Learning Toolkit, and this has become part of Cisco’s work with clients to create a normalized baseline of network performance across the enterprise.

“Machine learning plays a pretty significant role, and I can only expect the contribution it will make to increase over time,” Karim concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2017. (* Disclosure: Splunk Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE