Automate Operations with Cisco Intersight At a Glance
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The demand to deliver traditional and new AI workloads has fundamentally transformed the pace and expectations of IT operations. Yet yesterday’s manual, device-centric management tools prevent IT teams from supporting rapidly changing infrastructure deployments that span data-center and edge environments. IT staff must perform the same manual tasks on multiple devices, which is time- consuming and error-prone, results in inconsistent application of policies, and locks staff into low-value tasks.
Traditional infrastructure management cannot keep up.
Automating IT operations is one of the best ways to deliver applications and infrastructure faster and reduce operational risk with standardization. At the same time, automation empowers your team to eliminate manual, repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategic work.
Cisco Intersight®, Cisco’s IT operations platform delivered as a service, helps your team automate IT operations tasks and complex workflows, OS installation, replacement-part orders and shipping, and personnel- and infrastructure-management procedures using the ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) platform.
Automate deployments, configuration, workflows, and day-0 to day-N tasks
Using Intersight, you can orchestrate infrastructure across data-center and edge environments. The built-in workflow designer lets you create and execute complex workflows using a drag-and-drop tool. You can start from a library of curated tasks and workflows or design your own workflows. Not only does this help you work faster, but it also leverages domain knowledge through reusable tasks designed by experts. Workflow Designer is so flexible that it allows you to use your existing automation from third-party tools. If you already use Red Hat Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform, or other automation tools, you can incorporate your existing automation from them into Intersight using generic executors. The Intersight API and Software Development Kits (SDKs) allow Intersight automation to be called from other management systems.
Automate tasks and workflows using the drag-and-drop workflow designer and a library of ready-to-use tasks and workflows.
”By using Cisco Intersight to automate and orchestrate IT operations workflows, organizations can reduce the amount of manual effort spent when deploying and managing workloads.”
– Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Modernizing Compute Environments With Cisco UCS® X-Series and Cisco Intersight, ESG, December 2024
● Deliver applications and infrastructure faster—anytime and anywhere
● Reduce operational risk through standardization
● Simplify cross-domain orchestration
● Resolve issues faster
● Deliver OpEx savings
Operating System (OS) installation is a time-consuming and mundane task. When done manually, and depending on the OS, it can take 30 minutes to a couple of hours to perform on a single server. With Intersight, automated OS installation is executed in a single click through certified response files that follow a standard OS installation path, which reduces operational risk. Automated OS installation lets you scale from a single server to hundreds of server instances.
Intersight classifies operating systems in two tiers. Tier 1 currently includes Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and VMware ESXi, and Tier 2 includes CentOS, Citrix Hypervisor, Oracle Linux, SuSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux operating systems. When revisions occur on a Tier-1 system, automated OS installation is available for it on day-0. When new versions of Tier-2 systems are available, automated OS installation is available with the next Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Platform software release. By automating OS installation on either Tier-1 or Tier-2 systems, you can reduce operational risk, accelerate time-to-service for your infrastructure, and free up your team to deliver OpEx savings.
Automated parts replacement with proactive RMA
A faulty or failed hardware component can bring workloads to a grinding halt. Rather than risk downtime from identifying a faulty component after it has failed, you can eliminate risk by detecting a faulty part proactively. The platform automatically detects faults on Cisco hardware under Intersight management,* generates service requests through the Cisco® Technical Assistance Center (Cisco TAC), and collects related log files.
If a return material authorization (RMA) is determined to be the best solution, Intersight sets up an RMA in the ordering systems, and the automated assistant (Cisco TAC AI Sherlock) sends the user an email with instructions to complete the replacement part shipment. The RMA action from the identification of the device fault to part replacement notification e-mail is completed in less than an hour. Analysis of our case-resolution time data shows that Proactive RMA resolves issues on average two days faster than when done manually.
*See full list of hardware components supported by Proactive RMA.
“You know you are being proactive when an engineer replaces a hard drive that was displaying anomalies before it fails and causes problems downstream.”
- Distinguished engineer, global technology conglomerate.
Resolve issues faster through integration with ServiceNow
Cisco Intersight integrates with your ServiceNow IT operations management ticketing systems through the Service Graph Connector for Cisco Intersight and the Cisco Incident Management Integration Plugin for ServiceNow (available on the ServiceNow store). The connector automatically pulls information from Intersight-managed infrastructure into ServiceNow so you can predict, prevent, and resolve service outages faster.
The connector provides automatic data collection from all Cisco Intersight-connected UCS, network, storage, and virtualized infrastructure, including relationships across them in Service Graphs format. This gives you a complete view of your environment, including complex deployments that span multiple locations. By using I ntersight as a discovery source, you can see all the relationships between virtual machines, servers, chassis, and the network fabric in ServiceNow. This helps you make decisions and take actions across IT stacks.
The Cisco Intersight Incident Management Integration Plugin for ServiceNow also automatically creates ServiceNow tickets for any faults and alarms raised by assets under Intersight management. ServiceNow ticket routing policies can assign the right maintenance personnel to the respective issues, resulting in speedier resolutions.
Learn more about automation and infrastructure lifecycle management with Cisco Intersight or view an on-demand demo.
Do you have automation ideas or questions you’d like to share with your peers? Or would you like sample tasks and workflows? Visit the Orchestration DevNet Community and join the conversation!