Introducing the Cisco Intersight Mobile App for Data Center Visibility on the Go

With the tremendous customer adoption of Cisco Intersight, Cisco has now extended the reach of its Management-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with the introduction of the Cisco Intersight Mobile App. The Intersight Mobile App provides a new intuitive view of Intersight managed systems, allowing users to keep an eye on what’s going on in their data center no matter where they are or what device they use.

The iOS version of the app is available now in the Apple App Store and the Android version will be available in the Google Play Store soon.

The new app provides on-the-go Health and Inventory detail for your Intersight-managed UCS and Hyperflex environment, so if a managed system’s health degrades to a point where an alarm is generated, the app will display relevant alarm detail. In addition, a comprehensive status of any Intersight-driven request can be monitored via the “Requests” dashboard.   Below we’re going to walk you through a series of screenshots with a few examples in the new app, so you see first-hand how easy it is to monitor your data center while you’re not in the office

How does it work?

The Intersight OpenAPI provides a REST-based, programmatic interface for accessing the Intersight Management Information Model that is representative of your compute environment. The App solicits this model through the API and returns a rich set of status-related details for UCS Servers, HyperFlex Clusters, and Fabric Interconnects. These details are then displayed in an easy to understand format within the App.

A quick peek at the appropriate dashboard can reveal Server, HyperFlex Cluster, or Fabric Interconnect views for your environment. These dashboards provide high-level roll-ups showing health, inventory, model, and alarm summaries.

How are my servers doing?

This dashboard is showing that there are 54 healthy systems on the Server Dashboard, with one showing up as critical. To investigate, simply select the red “Critical” hot link. Seeing that it’s C220, you can then select that server.

In this scenario, the app is showing an alarm indicating a problem with fan 1 in server 1. The user can then take this information, turn on the locator from the app and have one of the operators go and assess the situation.

HyperFlex Storage Capacity on the Go

Taking a closer look at the HyperFlex Dashboard and the HyperFlex “Top 5 Storage Utilization” summary on the bottom of the screen, it appears HX-SJC-01 has a capacity warning. Digging deeper into the HyperFlex Cluster Details for HX-SJC-01, it appears 61.8% of 110.6 TB is in use. This information tells the app user that they’ll need to keep an eye on the situation.

The Intersight App can also be used to monitor the progress of requests initiated through Intersight. For instance, if someone kicked off an OS installation on one of their C240 servers the previous day, they can see if – and how – that finished up. In the screenshot below it appears that the task is complete, and only took 38 minutes.

Here is a complete list of my current alarms.  There are several issues being flagged with varying levels of severity.  The alarms provide a level of visibility that enables IT teams to prioritize and be proactive in managing their infrastructure.

This is just the beginning for Intersight’s Mobile App. With this introductory version of the mobile app, users get:

◈ On-the-go health and inventory detail
◈ HyperFlex capacity detail
◈ Status and monitoring of Intersight-driven requests