Leveraging Cisco Observability and AWS Cloud for Grid Resilience

As Africa accelerates its transition towards renewable energy, the reliability, efficiency and intelligent management of electricity transportation infrastructure are becoming increasingly important. Integrating renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydropower and bioenergy into national and regional electricity grids requires robust digital infrastructure capable of monitoring power generation, transmission, distribution and consumption in real time.
This session will explore how Cisco's networking, observability and digital experience assurance solutions, combined with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, can transform renewable energy transportation through intelligent monitoring, predictive analytics, AI-assisted troubleshooting and optimized telemetry management.
The discussion will focus on three complementary technology capabilities:

1. Cisco Splunk Observability: Unified Visibility for Renewable Energy Infrastructure
Splunk Observability provides unified visibility and AI-assisted troubleshooting across applications, infrastructure and distributed environments.
In renewable energy transportation, this capability can be applied to:
- Monitor electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure, including substations, smart meters, transformers and grid-connected renewable energy installations.
- Correlate operational telemetry from IoT sensors, SCADA environments, network infrastructure and cloud applications.
- Identify performance anomalies, equipment communication failures and disruptions affecting energy transportation.
- Apply AI-assisted troubleshooting to identify potential causes of operational and digital infrastructure failures.
- Improve operational decision-making through real-time dashboards and predictive insights.

2. Cisco ThousandEyes: Assuring Digital Experiences Across Energy Networks
ThousandEyes provides end-to-end visibility into digital experiences across owned and unowned networks.
Renewable energy transportation increasingly depends on interconnected digital systems, including cloud platforms, telecommunications providers, remote substations, grid control centres and third-party network operators.
ThousandEyes can help energy companies:
- Monitor network connectivity between renewable energy generation facilities and electricity distribution control centres.
- Identify network latency, packet loss, routing problems and connectivity disruptions.
- Assure the performance of cloud-hosted energy management applications and remote monitoring systems.
- Monitor digital service dependencies across telecommunications providers and third-party infrastructure.
- Improve the reliability of communications supporting smart grids, distributed energy resources and remote grid operations.

3. AWS Cloud and Telemetry Pipeline Management: Intelligent Energy Data Processing
AWS provides scalable cloud infrastructure for collecting, processing, storing and analysing telemetry from renewable energy transportation infrastructure.
A key discussion area will be Telemetry Pipeline Management, which addresses the growing volume of operational data generated by renewable energy infrastructure.
Rather than transmitting every sensor event and network log directly into expensive monitoring environments, organizations can implement intelligent telemetry pipelines that prioritize, filter, aggregate, enrich and route data according to operational importance.
Potential AWS services include:
- AWS IoT Core: Securely collect telemetry from smart meters, transformers, solar installations and connected energy equipment.
- Amazon Kinesis: Stream and process high-volume operational telemetry in real time.
- Amazon MSK: Support distributed event streaming and integration with enterprise telemetry systems.
- Amazon S3: Retain historical telemetry for energy analytics, compliance and long-term reporting.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Monitor AWS infrastructure, applications and operational metrics.
- Amazon SageMaker AI: Develop predictive models for equipment failure, grid anomalies and energy transportation performance.
Telemetry pipelines can integrate with Splunk Observability and ThousandEyes to provide a more comprehensive operational picture.