Cisco continued its observability expansion this week, rolling out updates to its Intersight management tool and expanding the reach of its ThousandEyes platform. The moves target the vendor’s ongoing work in helping customers move and manage their applications in a hybrid-cloud environment.

Intersight is Cisco’s cloud-based infrastructure management tool. It initially launched in 2017 after spinning out of the vendor’s Project Starship efforts. ThousandEyes is the network visibility platform that Cisco acquired last year for a cool $1 billion.

The latest Intersight expansion includes a new Cloud Orchestrator and Workload Engine.

Intersight Cloud Orchestrator provides a low-code, automated framework to make it easier to orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and speed up the delivery of application-based services. Kaustubh Das, SVP and GM for cloud and compute at Cisco, explained during the vendor’s Cloud Future event this week, that the product “is the magic that transforms your cloud targets and your on-prem targets into a hybrid-cloud platform to land your workloads."

“Everything from getting the server and network policies, provisioning storage, landing, and operating system, [and] layering on a container platform can be driven by a workflow, all from one place,” he said.

The Intersight Workload Engine is an operating system for Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that allows for the management of virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes clusters side-by-side.

Both sit on top of Cisco’s Intersight Infrastructure Service.

Tangentially, Cisco also rolled out its Service Mesh Manager that acts as an extension of its Intersight Kubernetes Service to provide observability, management, policy-based security, and visualization of service topologies to Kubernetes clusters running on-premises or in the cloud.

“It allows for visualization of service meshes that are created using Istio,” Das explained in an interview with SDxCentral. “When you're a developer you write code and you drive things programmatically. When you're an IT operator you want to be able to say: ‘OK, what rules are configured out there? Can I get a global view?’”

As an example, Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM for Cisco’s Enterprise Networking division, explained during a presentation at the Cisco Future Cloud event that the manager allows DevOps teams to run a canary deployment by diverting a “small fraction of application traffic to a new version of the software and test it right in production with real user traffic without affecting most of my users.”

Das also explained that the Service Mesh Manager complements the recent integration of HashiCorp’s Terraform into its broader Intersight offering. And it’s also based on some of the technology Cisco gained when it acquired Banzai Cloud late last year.

To power these hybrid-cloud services, Cisco also launched the new X-Series of its Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware. As should be expected of anything “new,” the hardware boasts exceedingly high-performance metrics for an x86-based server, though Das also highlighted the platform’s flexibility due to its use of Intersight.

“Our customers used to have to trade between the operational simplicity of a modular architecture like this, and the fact that in a rack platform you could fit more accelerators that could fit more storage. And it was actually a little bit of a false trade off because technology should allow you to do both,” Das said, adding that the new platform has room for the storage, accelerators, GPU, and PCIe.

It then uses Intersight to “take the friction out of taking hardware and converting it into a cloud infrastructure,” Das added. “So all of the steps between taking something that lands on your loading dock, to putting the right bits on it in terms of firmware, files, policies, and configuring the right policies, layering on an operating system, layering on a container platform, and then getting your applications up and running, and getting all of that monitored and observed, top to bottom, that friction which used to be often [a] month, it's literally policies, it’s minutes.”

Despite the timing, the update is not tied to Cisco’s more recent expansion of work with AMD. That deal, which was announced in March, had Cisco insert AMD’s third-generation EPYC 7003-series processors as an option to its UCS rack servers. Das explained that while the UCS X-Series launch is based on Intel, there is nothing that would restrict a different platform down the road.

As for deepening ThousandEyes integration, that service is now part of Cisco’s SD-WAN edge routers. This provides insight into how software-defined networks impact application performance, and it allows IT teams to then decide which WAN provider to use when re-architecting their network. And for service providers: It provides monitoring for service level agreements (SLAs) and performance metrics.

“We can see the entire connectivity through the entire SD-WAN fabric and through the internet,” Nightingale.