NetApp Cloud Insights Reviews

Our organization manages cloud platforms for our customers. We use the solution to deploy our CMP platform on the cloud.

The solution is easy to deploy.

In our area, many customers cannot afford the solution. The solution’s price is an issue.

I have been using this solution for one year.

The solution is stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The support is not very quick.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy. I would rate the initial setup a ten out of ten.

The deployment took seven months. We needed three people to deploy the solution.

The solution is expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

GCP is our cloud provider. Our clients are small enterprises. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The first use case for NetApp Cloud Insights is to monitor clients' infrastructure, excluding their networking equipment, such as IP-based network switches. NetApp Cloud Insights allows clients to monitor their solution from the application down to the storage layer, without drilling down to specific issues such as heat maps, bottlenecks, or spikes in IOPS. This functionality is not limited to NetApp storage or products; it also supports other vendors' products, including HPE, IBM, Dell, and Hitachi, as well as various server vendors and solutions such as Nutanix, VMware, and applications like Oracle, SQL, Microsoft, Linux, and Kubernetes.

The second use case involves end-to-end cyber resilience, starting from the storage layer, where it provides intelligence to interconnect with the on-tap feature. This ensures that any anomaly within a ransomware attack can be detected, reported, and action is taken, such as creating a snapshot. This allows the system or site administrator to recover from a ransomware attack if needed. Additionally, the system can perform cost calculations for multiple business units based on storage capacities, such as calculating the cost of storage per TB or GB. Capacity planning can also be done to determine how long the resources will last before running out. 

The solution can be deployed across public, private, and hybrid cloud services and we use AWS, Azure, and Google.

The ease of installation is good.

The IP-based monitoring could be added in a future release.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is 98 percent stable.

The solution is 98 percent scalable.

NetApp Cloud Insight can be used for any size organization.

The technical support is quick to resolve our issues.

Positive

The initial setup process is simple and can be done through self-service. We only require credentials for the necessary equipment, and then we can set up the research, generate reports, and customize them as needed. The best part is that no special training is required.

The amount of time required for deployment is dependent on the quantity of equipment that requires monitoring, therefore, it may take a few seconds or up to several minutes.

NetApp Cloud Insights is affordable compared to some of the perpetual cloud-based solutions that are out there. There is a standard premium license so depending on the features that we want, we can get a good price.

I give the price a nine out of ten.

We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

The data retention is only for a one-year period of time. For longer retention, the customer must download and store the data somewhere.

NetApp Cloud Insights is an excellent product that can be used regardless of whether we are using NetApp, HP, Dell, or Nutanix. One of the great things about this product is that there is a freeware license available for customers who manage up to 500 gigabytes. However, this license has limited features and does not include reporting.

It is for long-term tracking of performance information. I am also looking at the interaction between NetApp systems and non-NetApp systems.

It's only really being used for the storage, and to a limited extent, our VMware.

It is maybe being used once or twice a day at most. We're not using it actively. We are just using it in kind of a testing phase.

It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue.

The solution’s ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of our environment is good. However, I am making limited use of this.

I use Cloud Secure quite a lot. It's useful to track down what has happened in cases where users' files have gone missing, or they have lost them.

There are some very specific things for improvement in the Cloud Secure product. I have already given this feedback to the product managers regarding this area. 

Probably about a year.

The stability is reasonable, but there is some room for improvement.

It is very scalable. You can deploy an agent on different sites and places, if you want to.

I am probably the only person in the company who is using it. We're not really using the solution an awful lot, so it is not making a lot of difference at the moment to us. Later on, it might with a larger buy-in and involvement of different job functions. 

When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions.

We have other solutions that do kind of the things vaguely in this area. However, they don't cover everything in the way that Cloud Insights does.

I found the initial setup pretty straightforward. As long as you follow the instructions, you can get it initially up and running. 

The deployment took a day or two at most.

NetApp will tend to normally work with users to get it up and running rather than just leave you to your own devices. They were actually surprised that I got it up and running without using their help. The expectation is normally you would use their support for the setup. However, I did the initial implementation without any external support. So, it is relatively easy to set up, if you have a storage NetApp IT background.

The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model.

We were using the free tier, then they gave us some licenses for the full product, which last for six-months into a 12-month period. At this point, we are not paying for the product.

It was on the free tier. We were just testing to see what was in there, since there wasn't a cost. It was only to have a look.

We are not evaluating other solutions.

It is worth a small amount of effort to activate at the free tier: To see whether there is anything there which might help your business. Then, if you feel there will be stuff there, then maybe you can look at getting some licensing for the non-NetApp side of it.

I would rate this product as a seven out of 10.

I mainly use Cloud Insights for visualization and automation.

Cloud Insights' best features are visibility and the connector to move the workloads.

The first level of NetApp's technical support could be improved.

I've been using Cloud Insights since December last year.

The first level of NetApp's technical support is somewhat hit-and-miss.

I would rate Cloud Insights eight out of ten.