The Shift From Speed to Trust
The promise of AgenticOps is undeniable. At Cisco ThousandEyes, we’ve seen this first-hand with customers using products like Cisco AI Assistant and the ThousandEyes MCP server to accelerate workflows that were once performed manually.
At the same time, NetOps teams are under increasing pressure to move faster without increasing operational risk. They’re navigating fragmented telemetry, persistent alert noise, and blind spots that extend well beyond their own networks into the Internet, SaaS, and cloud. The demand is clear: simplify troubleshooting, accelerate diagnostics and remediation, and create a path toward faster, more autonomous operations.
But speed alone isn’t the answer. We’ve also seen how speed without guardrails introduces real operational risk. AI doesn’t just execute faster; it can scale decisions instantly. And when those decisions are wrong, the blast radius can expand just as quickly. To avoid amplifying risk, teams need controls, context, and feedback loops that make autonomy trusted, with strong governance through mechanisms such as review, approval, policy audit, and postmortem.
That’s where AgenticOps—operations that use AI to help detect, diagnose, recommend, act, and validate, including governance and human oversight—and Cisco Assurance intersect.
It's against this backdrop that we’re introducing the next evolution of the Cisco Assurance suite at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, not as a set of standalone features, but as a unified system for trusted, closed-loop operations at scale, built to optimize digital experiences and assure positive business outcomes.
Cisco Assurance: The Foundation for Trusted AgenticOps
Cisco Assurance brings together AI-driven insights, agentic workflows, and continuous validation into a single operational model centered around end user experience. It unifies fragmented telemetry into decision-ready intelligence and helps ensure that actions, whether human-initiated or AI-assisted, are governed, explainable, and validated against real-world outcomes.
This system comes to life through a tightly integrated set of capabilities:
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Experience Metrics – A single source of truth for user experience, prioritizing issues based on real user impact.
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Agentic Actions – Turning insight into action with AI-driven remediation and governed automation.
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End-to-End Synthetics – Validating actions with end-to-end simulation of user experience.
Together, these form a closed-loop system that helps NetOps teams understand experience, take action, validate outcomes, and adapt in real time.
Experience Metrics: From Device Health to User Experience
Imagine users in a branch beginning to experience intermittent Wi-Fi connectivity issues. No tickets have been filed yet, but the Cisco Meraki dashboard shows a drop in connectivity over the past 30 minutes. With the potential for widespread impact, the priority is to diagnose and resolve the issue before it escalates.
Traditionally, NetOps teams have operated reactively, using difficult-to-manage alerting, siloed tools, and device-level telemetry that must be correlated manually to fully understand the scope and extent of an issue. SNMP-based monitoring can provide interface metrics, but often lacks the broader context needed to understand the scope and cause of an issue.
Previewed at Cisco Live Amsterdam 2026, Experience Metrics introduces a fundamentally different approach. Now in beta availability for wireless and alpha availability for wired networks, it enables a shift from reactive device-centric troubleshooting to proactive, user-centric assurance.
Experience Metrics continuously measures digital experience across wired and wireless environments, correlating telemetry into a single, actionable view. AI-driven insights can help detect anomalies, classify failures, and prioritize issues based on real user impact, often before they are reported by end-users. It bridges the gap between visibility and action by triggering guided remediation or automated workflows to resolve issues faster.
In just a few clicks, Experience Metrics points to a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) failure as the primary contributor to failed connections. Drilling deeper reveals the root cause: misconfigured VLANs preventing DHCP requests from reaching the server. The platform summarizes the issue with a clear explanation that guides deeper investigation at the SSID, access point, device, or client level.
Agentic Actions: From Insight to Rapid Resolution
Once Experience Metrics identifies and explains the issue, the next step is remediation before user impact escalates. That’s where Agentic Actions comes in.
While Experience Metrics is meant to accelerate diagnostics and insights, Agentic Actions is built to accelerate resolution. By centralizing incidents and alerts into a unified, prioritized view, Agentic Actions provides a hub for initiating proactive updates and optimizations, with oversight that paves the way for more automated, yet safer, network operations.
Agentic Actions helps transform fragmented troubleshooting into a cohesive AI-assisted workflow, moving operations a step closer to trusted autonomy. With Agentic Actions, siloed troubleshooting gives way to outcome-driven remediation, aligning network performance directly with business priorities.
Experience Metrics diagnosed the root cause of the DHCP issue as a VLAN mismatch between a switch and the wireless access points connected to it. Agentic Actions confirms the likely root cause and recommends updating the VLAN configuration on the switch. After review and approval, clicking “Apply Changes” initiates a governed configuration based on the recommendations. The incident status updates, and normal connectivity is restored.
End-to-End Synthetics: Proving the Outcome
You’re now looking to close out this issue and prevent it from re-occurring. With the network back to normal and users online, you breathe a little easier. However, assurance is not only about technology; it’s about proving outcomes. The next step is end-to-end validation. That’s where End-to-End Synthetics become critical.
Synthetic tests help validate and prove outcomes in near real-time. They may already be a part of your operations, or they can be programmatically automated through agentic tooling and model context protocol (MCP) interactions with the ThousandEyes platform. By providing near real-time visibility into network performance before, during, and after issues arise across end-to-end paths, including the Internet and cloud, they make it possible to validate actions with evidence, proving, not just assuming, that issues are resolved.
Continual testing can confirm true recovery and surface instabilities or fluctuations that may occur at any point in the digital delivery chain, something that solutions offering less visibility are likely to miss.
The results and data generated by synthetic tests are ingested and represented within Experience Metrics. Through this workflow, you have not only resolved the VLAN mismatch issue but built a foundation for more proactively addressing or preventing issues.
Extending Assurance into an Expanded Set of Environments
Trusted AgenticOps must also work across the full range of use cases and environments in which businesses operate, including regulated, cloud, mobile, service provider, and embedded infrastructure. New capabilities from Cisco ThousandEyes are expanding Cisco Assurance to help more of our customers address these in different ways:
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Cisco ThousandEyes for Government – FedRAMP® Moderate authorized assurance for federal and regulated environments.
To learn more, read the blog and visit the Federal Customers Booth at Cisco Live.
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Internet Insights Provider Intelligence – Data-driven ISP evaluation and network planning powered by ThousandEyes collective intelligence.
To learn more, read the blog, visit the World of Solutions to see a demo, or attend the Cisco Live Lightning Talk on Provider Intelligence.
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Endpoint Agent Support for ChromeOS™ and Android™ Open Source Project (Beta) – Expanded endpoint visibility across education, enterprise, and environments that utilize virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
To learn more, reach out to your Cisco or Cisco ThousandEyes account team, and visit the World of Solutions to see a demo. You can also download Mobile Endpoint Agent version 1.7, now available in the Google Play store.
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Embedded Agent for Cisco Cloud-Managed Switches (Beta) – ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents managed directly through the Meraki Dashboard.
To learn more, or gain access to the Beta program, reach out to your Cisco or Cisco ThousandEyes account team or speak with a product expert at one of the ThousandEyes demo pods at Cisco Live.
Real-World Impacts
No matter where you are on your digital journey, AgenticOps is becoming an important part of your future. That future will be increasingly autonomous—but must be trusted. The combination of Experience Metrics, Agentic Actions, and End-to-End Synthetics is designed to help teams move in that direction. These capabilities are built to help deliver consistent, high-quality digital experiences at scale while reducing noise, accelerating resolution, and building operational trust.
Whether you’re working through SaaS implementation issues, SD-WAN optimizations, wireless or wired LAN troubleshooting, or network expansion, Cisco Assurance can help re-define what’s possible, with end-to-end visibility, AI-driven intelligence, and closed-loop operations.
Want to See Cisco Assurance in Action?
If you’re attending Cisco Live in Las Vegas, we’ll be demonstrating these capabilities in the Digital Resilience and Future-Proof Workplaces pavilions within the Cisco Solution Village.
You can also learn more and interact with our experts by attending a Lightning Talk presentation at one of the theatres located on the showcase floor. Check the schedule and be sure to set time on your agenda for these.
If you’re not attending Cisco Live, connect with your Cisco or Cisco ThousandEyes account team to arrange for a demo after the event.
Visit the Cisco Assurance page on www.cisco.com or visit www.thousandeyes.com to learn more and stay up to date.
Some of the products and features described herein remain in varying stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The delivery timeline of these products and features is subject to change at the sole discretion of Cisco, and Cisco will have no liability for delay in the delivery or failure to deliver any of the products or features set forth in this document.
Android and ChromeOS are trademarks of Google LLC.
