NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights Reviews

It is a monitoring and analysis tool. In our environment, we have different technologies such as VMware, Nutanix, or maybe a backup tool. Instead of monitoring them through different consoles, with Cloud Insights, we can integrate everything and monitor from a single console. 

The key challenges in enterprise environments that NetApp technology helps to address include the complexity of monitoring numerous servers, switches, and storage devices, as managing them individually requires dedicated resources that may not be available. In large environments with thousands of physical servers, it becomes almost impossible for a team member to constantly check health statuses and resource usage, leading to inefficiencies. NetApp Cloud Insights addresses these issues by simplifying troubleshooting, allowing customers to resolve problems within minutes rather than spending hours or even days on diagnostics.

NetApp technology, specifically NetApp Cloud Insights, has significantly impacted the way my customers do business. One customer had multiple components, such as a VMware environment, Cisco switches, NetApp storage, and backup tools. Previously, the customer had to monitor all these tools individually each morning by logging into every console to check for errors or performance issues. It used to take them about 1 or 2 hours, but after we installed NetApp Cloud Insights, the time spent was reduced to just 5 minutes with a single console where they could monitor everything.

The customer can integrate their VMware servers, Cisco switches, and storage with NetApp Cloud Insights to quickly identify any problems and resolve issues efficiently, demonstrating a reduction in complexity and monitoring time.

The values that NetApp Cloud Insights delivers to my customers are evident in real examples, such as an application team running their application on a single VM connected through a switch and storage. When they experience a performance issue, the VMware team needs to identify the source of the slowness, whether it's from the server, switch, or storage, which requires a time-consuming investigation of each component. Without NetApp Cloud Insights, this process is slow and stressful for both the application team and the VMware team, but with the tool, a single click allows the customer to pinpoint the issue directly, improving response times to performance problems immensely.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and the proliferation of AI highly influence my customers' technology decisions, as having NetApp storage in their environment allows them to detect ransomware attacks effectively. NetApp guarantees data recovery in case of such attacks, and here, NetApp Cloud Insights plays a crucial role; it can identify where a ransomware attack originates, allowing the IT team to respond rapidly, such as disconnecting affected devices to mitigate the damage, especially crucial when multiple users are involved.

NetApp Cloud Insights helps reduce the time spent on problem resolution by up to 50% for my customers, making their operations significantly more efficient and productive, which is a perfect outcome.

NetApp Cloud Insights is very helpful for troubleshooting. In an enterprise, there can be thousands of servers and tools. If a user is facing a performance issue, it is very hard to troubleshoot. NetApp Cloud Insights helps us to analyze where exactly the issue is coming from. It is a very good monitoring tool to monitor all the environment components from a single console.

In my opinion, one area where NetApp Cloud Insights could be improved for the next release is the console, which I find a bit complex. Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to navigate and find components, so new customers might require considerable hands-on experience to efficiently use the console, indicating that it could be more user-friendly. Aside from the complexity of the console, I don't find any other significant areas needing improvement, as everything else in NetApp Cloud Insights works absolutely fine.

I've been using it for three years.

My customers do consider other vendors before working with NetApp; however, those competitors often have limitations. For example, they may only monitor specific brands such as Dell servers, creating dependency issues that restrict monitoring capabilities. While I can't recall the exact name of that competitor, I know that their tools do not offer the versatility that NetApp provides.

When comparing NetApp with other solutions, the standout benefits of NetApp are its ability to monitor all components in a customer's environment without the vendor-specific limitations seen with competitors' tools. Customers can use a mix of Dell, HP, or Lenovo servers and expect consistent monitoring across the board. This lack of dependency on hardware allows for a more integrated and comprehensive monitoring solution, which is a significant advantage.

NetApp Cloud Insights delivers significant efficiencies in addressing performance issues as experienced by an application team running on a single VM. The VMware team must methodically check each component—servers, switches, and storage—to find the cause of application slowness, which is time-consuming and frustrating for all parties. With NetApp Cloud Insights, a single click allows for immediate identification of whether the issue is with the storage, server, or network, ensuring faster resolution and improved customer satisfaction.

I would rate NetApp Cloud Insights a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for Cloud Insights is to provide visibility into our storage groups and other products we don't natively have access to. It gives a lot of behind-the-scenes knowledge about what was happening with the internal personalization group. We had access to their environment to back it up and assist them with the REST situation. 

NetApp Cloud Insights helps with login monitoring and troubleshooting. Previously, if we had performance concerns or needed to interface with other groups and their products, a task that should require only one or two people turned into a six-person job.

Cloud Insights allowed us to do some diagnostics and poke around before we took it to the other groups. We can say, "Here's where we see our bottlenecks are and what the potential impact will be. The solution enabled us to have a better response and be more intelligent about the decisions we're trying to make.

You can locate the full stack of your compute. We use private channel switching, so we can look at the intermediate stack and say which UCS blades are connected through what ports. We can see the links between devices without having to go to a separate panel for Cisco, VMware, etc. We can look at everything through a single pane of glass. 

It takes around 15 minutes to get everything inventoried once we get the on-premises data collector configured and running. We had to ensure it had all the credentials we needed to import them. We let it collect and come back, then it's all there. It did an excellent job of integrating quickly. It was honestly impressive.

Cloud Insights is excellent for pinpointing problem areas like issues with switches and back-to-back overruns on ports tied to our UCS fabric and interconnected storage. It was challenging to determine what was a problem, and no one could give us a solid answer, including Cisco, our architects, or Oracle.  If you do not see a problem, then it isn't a problem. However, just because something isn't a problem today that doesn't mean it won't be a problem tomorrow. We're still working through architecting our own solution to get rid of that, but Cloud Insights did help pinpoint that within an hour of us being in it, reporting, and poking around.

Cloud Insights gives us visibility into more than just our infrastructure. Our virtualization and storage groups are separate. Virtualization and computing are separate, but we can manage the storage infrastructure and switching. It became confusing when we were trying to troubleshoot because we knew what we were presenting to them and loosely what was supposed to be on it, but we didn't know what they did. It turns into a game of 20 questions. 

Sometimes, you say, "We're getting alerts for this. Can you tell us what's going on?" It immediately turns into a battery of questions: What type of concerns? Who's complaining? With Cloud Insights, we can identify the problem device and see what's in it. We can see what node it's on. We've got one virtual machine that's pulling in 20 other ones, so we can ask the virtualization guys, "Are you concerned about this? You're not? Okay, you deal with this later." 

Cloud Insights enabled us to make better decisions with our infrastructure instead of blindly knocking on doors, saying, "Hey, are you getting alerts, too?" It has helped diagnose a rash of issues. It's led us to some significant annoyances with Cisco and getting them to assist in resolving some of them.

Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud Insights, you can ask NetApp to help you build the reports from the ground up. The dashboards are intuitive, but finding the report you want is sometimes a challenge. If you don't have the report already loaded, pulling it in and letting it build its data can be cumbersome. 

That was a nuisance for the virtualization group. Also, it can be hard to express the value to these other groups. We already have tools that do this, but we don't have access to them, and they don't want to give it to us.  We just want this resolved quickly, but selling them on value was difficult to do. Some groups immediately saw the value and abandoned other tools, whereas others have been like, "We've used these tools for 15 years. They work great for us. Why can't you get on board?"  It's difficult when you're coming up with a brand new tool against entrenched people who don't care to try something else. Those are two of our big primary technologies with them.

It's easy to sell storage people on intuitive reporting. Before we moved to NetApp, reporting off of the storage was a nightmare. SMIS was a terrible protocol, and it should have died decades ago. We're ready to use new reporting tools, but our virtualization people have used these tools since VMware was invented. 

I have used NetApp Cloud Insights for about a year off and on. I have about six months of hands-on experience with it.

Cloud Insights has been highly stable since we got rid of the ONTAP data collector. Initially, it was up and down constantly, and I had a ticket open for two weeks. No one could give me an answer. Finally, we got a call from a support technician who told me to uninstall the local data collector. He said they would dump that feature because it was too flaky.  

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. I don't interact much with NetApp technical support. We've mostly dealt with some of their integration teams, and we needed some assistance generating reports once. That process was nice and straightforward.  

I've dealt with NetApp support for nearly 15 years at this point, and it's changed a bit over the years, but it beats the support from some other companies that do mass storage by leaps and bounds. I once called NetApp about an issue with ONTAP, and they resolved it in 30 minutes. They've scaled since then and gone global.  

Still, I know I can get fast help with an urgent issue. I'm at a children's hospital, and if the doctors are having problems, I can get a callback in 30 minutes from the appropriate team. If it isn't the right team, they will follow up on the issue. I won't have to open a ticket and wait three hours for another call. I'm going to get the right person within 30 minutes.

Positive

Cloud Insights did help us retire a couple of things. We were utilizing two or three separate suites for storage. We still use some applications like NetApp Harvest, which we leverage for file-based workloads. SolarWinds Orion is not very good and expensive for what you get out of it. That was quickly abandoned. We're still using some of NetApp's other tools. We still have Unified Manager in place for different reasons, but we don't use it for reporting nearly as much. 

The initial deployment was shockingly easy. We attempted to use the ONTAP Cloud connector before that was deprecated, and it was unstable. It was a little disappointing because that was the easiest way to set it up. The most complex part was our own internal policies and getting a server provisioned for it. After that, we configured the cloud connector and that was it. 

It took a little while to wait for a guy to provision a server. Once that was done, it was straightforward to integrate Cloud Insights with individual products. For example, with VMware, we added the credentials and the IP address. The data collector discovers and starts pulling in. It was the easiest portion of the setup, and they did a fantastic job of making it integrate quickly.

Cloud Insights was part of a bundle, so it isn't easy to quantify whether we've realized an ROI. We have saved some money by discontinuing Orion's Storage Manager plugins. We've also saved some labor hours. Instead of looking at six portals to find an issue, we're only looking at a single pane of glass. 

The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about the end-use managed units and having an easy place to reference how far those units go. 

When I'm on the phone with our support team, they say it's simple, but they take 10 minutes to find the breakdown. Having a simple page that shows all of your MUs would be more helpful than what we experienced. 

I don't have the pricing off the top of my head, and I cannot recall what our deployment cost. It always came down to what we wanted to integrate and what that would turn into. You needed to map it out to figure out where it fits. If I had my way, I would be able to size my environment in the Active IQ portal, and it would tell me approximately what it would cost me. Active IQ sees everything, so it might as well be able to tell me an estimate of the price. 

I rate NetApp Cloud Insights eight out of 10. It has some room to grow. I only say eight because sometimes it's a little difficult to interpret what the metrics mean. They can report on these metrics, track them, and train them, but there is never a good answer about what they mean. I realized it's hard to do when you're integrating with 30-something products. 

I can highlight it and get some context clues about what's happening, but it doesn't give me the scope or the impact. It will tell you that if you're seeing these types of issues, contact your support vertical to resolve them. However, if you're reporting on these metrics, it could be helpful to get large amounts of information within that menu or a submenu.

Our primary use case is for holistic infrastructure monitoring, monitoring the stack from VMware down through SAN Fabrics and into the storage.

We've been OCI customers for many years before going to Cloud Insights. We didn't specifically implement Cloud Insights to address anything in particular. It quickly identifies if there's an actual problem in the infrastructure. 

Oftentimes, application folks claim performance issues, and Cloud Insights makes it easy to confirm or refute that.

It's a significant time saver. Having all the metrics in one place prevents the need to manually collect data, saving days or weeks of time.

NetApp Cloud Insight's ability to quickly figure out independencies across the assembled topology of our environment is its secret sauce. As long as I plug in the individual pieces of the infrastructure stack, it's able to figure out the rest and determine the relationships between VMs, Hypervisor servers, fiber channel ports, and what the SAN fabrics are doing, even down into the storage. 

I can sit there and click through all the way from a VM down to individual disks on the SAN and look at performance. I don't have to train it about what the relationships are; it figures it out.

Insight has helped to right-size workloads because it's really easy to go in and start looking for excesses. Just the other day, I found a virtual machine that had eight processors hanging off of it that was averaging 0.025% CPU load over the past 30 days. It was very easy to go in and get that kind of data. It's great at that.

The most valuable features are the dashboards and data visualization. There are multiple ways to visualize data.

It's cleaner than traditional graphs like bar graphs or line charts. 

For monitoring, the infrastructure stack is pretty holistic. It's not a LAN WAN monitoring tool, so it's not really going to look at the network side of things other than SAN Fabrics. As far as the infrastructure deck that we have, it's also pretty holistic.

Moreover, the solution is good at pinpointing problem areas; it is able to pull in metrics from all different sources in the infrastructure stack, figure out the relationships between them, and then allow me to graph it all in a unified interface and consume the data in one place. Being able to look at latency literally in a single graph and examine it at the VM level, data store level, and SAN level and compare that within a single graph is hugely powerful.

One of the features that OCI had, which I liked, was called anomaly detection. It holistically examined metrics across an application, identifying deviations from the baseline. A classic example is if an application had a CPU spike every Friday at 5 PM for 30 minutes, anomaly detection would learn that pattern. 

If one Friday at 5 PM there's no CPU spike, it would flag it as potentially problematic. Cloud Insights currently lacks this feature, and I would like to see it reintroduced.

We have been using this solution for three years. 

Support's been great. I have a call with our cloud solutions folks every two weeks. We touch base and so they're very engaged with us, ensuring we're getting traction on the features we're looking for. If we run into any issues, they help us find a solution. 

The support's been really good, and the engagement's been good. 

Positive

We used OCI, OnCommand Insight. It was the self-hosted NetApp performance monitoring tool.

We made this switch because NetApp told us that the bulk of the development effort was going to be focused on Cloud Insights, so that was where new features were going to be landing first. 

If we wanted to suggest or recommend features, that's where it would go. So it just made sense to go there.  

The setup was pretty straightforward, coming from OCI, where we had five or six, seven servers. Now we're down to two data collectors, and that's it. 

It was pretty simple. We had to stand up a couple of Linux virtual machines and install the data collector there, which was straightforward. It was very easy to get set up and get started. 

The right sizing of workloads reduced costs. We buy our infrastructure and we run our own private cloud environment. It's not like the public cloud where when you turn it off, you instantly get cost savings. As more workloads come into the environment, if we right size what we already have, it helps defer or delay,  that next hardware purchase. 

Is it an immediate cost savings in terms of turning off a light switch and seeing the electric meter stop running? Not necessarily, but that's just not our environment. But it is cost savings in terms of getting the most out of the hardware we purchased.

We had OCI, so that was obviously evaluated as an option. Being that we're a NetApp shop, it just made the most sense to go with that tool.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use Cloud Insights to provide monitoring and dashboarding to our customers. 

All our production clusters are in Cloud Insight. It provides a single pane of glass, giving us visibility into the environment, which allows us to understand if any issues are going on across any of our clusters.

The main issue we were looking to address was the lack of visibility across all the clusters in one single view. We're using Cloud Insight's Unified Manager. It has improved our ability to support and see the immediate status of the entire environment. If we have a critical incident, we can quickly see these issues and loop in monitoring teams and other teams. For example, if our app team thinks there are issues in the environment, we can quickly see if anything related to storage is part of the problem.

It improved our organization by unifying all the various support teams. We all have the same view of what's happening in the environment. The dev team knows what storage is used or not, and we can quickly move on to other activities. Cloud Insights provides a single tool for containers and other cloud-based architectures, but we're not using some of those things, such as Kubernetes. We're primarily leveraging the monitoring and reporting.

The solution does a great job of inventorying our resources. It allows us to put the tags on the devices. The process is fast. It also gives you the dependencies. I can dig down into all the related components. Cloud Insight's advanced analytics feature does a good job of highlighting the areas where there might be issues in the future.

Cloud Insights could offer more detail when we drill down into the Azure environment.

We started with a proof of concept and went live in our production environment in January 2022. 

Cloud Insights is rock solid. The weakness might be the Azure backend, but it's highly stable in general. 

Cloud Insights is highly scalable. We can add additional clusters for replication and failover ability.

NetApp support is excellent. They respond very quickly. 

We were using NetApp Unified Manager, which provides a cluster-by-cluster view. Cloud Insights provides us with a single pane of glass and allows our other monitoring teams to share this view as well.

The setup is fairly straightforward. The only challenge we may have had was building out some of the dashboards, and the NetApp team helped us build those.

We looked at other products, but we've been using NetApp for quite a while, so we're familiar with that product line.

I rate NetApp Cloud Insights nine out of 10. 

Our storage team uses the solution to monitor security vulnerabilities and forecast capacity. 

The visibility and assistance with security vulnerabilities are valuable. For example, last year we had an issue with log forgeries but it was easy to fix because the dashboard highlighted the issue and provided solutions.  

The visualization needs some improvement because there are occasional delays while the system queries information.  

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution's stability is very good. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup is managed by the solution because it is in the cloud. Once you create an account, you have access to the solution.

The solution's pricing is based on the device you purchase and includes support services. There are no ongoing fees or licenses. 

If you want to upgrade, the support team suggests a process and provides any workarounds needed. 

The solution includes more features than CloudIQ.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use Cloud Secure to monitor and secure our SIS and NFS file systems, particularly for protection against ransomware threats.

We decided to complement our existing product, Varonis, with NetApp Cloud Insights because Varonis wasn't providing us with real-time information. Cloud Insights, on the other hand, offers real-time data and insights into the functionality of our systems. It has been a valuable addition for us, as it provides immediate data that our security team reviews to assess potential attacks.

One feature we appreciate the most is its ability to take snapshots, which adds an extra layer of security and allows us to protect our data effectively. The visibility is incredibly important for us. It allows us to monitor and track who is accessing our data and what actions they are performing, even if they have legitimate access rights. 

I've been quite impressed with the capability to create an inventory of resources as it allows us to easily assess our space, capacity, and performance.

Most of the time, I initially connect with entry-level support, and then I need to request a higher-tier support level, which can result in delays.

I have been using it for one year.

The system's stability is consistently reliable, and I'm highly impressed with the regular updates and their frequency because they are non-disruptive and offer a high level of transparency.

Its support has been consistently excellent. I've been a long-time user of their services for many years, although I haven't required their assistance recently because I've been handling many tasks on my own. I would rate it eight out of ten.

We have used Varonis for ransomware alerts, utilizing its policy framework to enhance our security posture. While Varonis is a policy-based application, it lacks the capability to provide real-time data and notifications. In contrast, Cloud Insights' Cloud Secure feature offers real-time information and allows us to take snapshots when specific policy conditions are met. This ability to respond in real-time and protect our data with snapshots is of great significance to us.

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

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.

We use it primarily to look at both performance and security around our NetApp Filers. I know it can expand to other entities within the NetApp, but we really focus on looking at our Filers and using Cloud Secure to see potential ransomware attacks, unauthorized changes to files, and deletions.

It's a SaaS solution hosted by NetApp.

Before we started using Cloud Insights, there wasn't really a good solution if something bypassed our firewalls and was sitting in dormant mode. In that situation, it was difficult for us to find it before it was too late. This solution gives us an opportunity to proactively see abnormal behavior before it hits a Zero-day attack.

We used to have a weekly file audit which was scripted, so there wasn't a whole bunch of time lost using that. But the difference is around the gap between when the file audit would last run versus this as a more real-time solution. If we had to collect the data the way this service is doing so, we couldn't really put a value on that because it is a real-time solution.

It also provides a single tool for cloud-based architectures, such as microservices and containers, as well as on-premises infrastructure. We've looked at pointing the data collectors at various entities, whether it's an HCI solution or a NetApp Filer or even some of our cloud instances. The flexibility of being able to look at various resources, whether they're cloud or something that is on-premise, is a huge benefit. Having all those data collectors in one location and being able to compare that information is invaluable.

The solution’s ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of our environment—the performance and metrics and dashboards for doing that—is amazing. We're able to see and compare things like latency, and overlay latency between what may seem like two completely separate systems. If they're running, you can do comparisons on them, so when a particular application is running and it's causing influxes on both sides, it helps you dig into queries and application performance overall. The relational portion of this solution is beneficial.

It provides us with advanced analytics around being able to overlay data and compare various storage entities, their latencies, and overall performance, to gauge whether an application is performing well. It helps us see if it's something with policies or an actual, physical limitation of the solution we're using. Being able to look at overall IOPS and then drill down is super-beneficial. And the advanced analytics have definitely helped us with tuning SQL and looking at how we have our SQL LUNs or volumes laid out; whether we want to separate them by log and data, or other options. It helps with load balancing and overall performance of those high-storage, intensive applications.

In addition, the advanced analytics have helped to reduce the time it takes to find performance issues. They've helped with identifying applications that are causing latency and that may be affecting other applications. The analytics help with root cause analysis. One example is looking at nodes that are in high demand and being able to say, "Okay, this node is showing to be in higher demand than another node," and knowing we may need to move some of the load over so that, performance-wise, we have a better plane and everything correlates better. From a troubleshooting perspective, NetApp Cloud Insights saves at least 10 hours of my storage admin's time per week.

It has also helped to right-size workloads. From a helpdesk perspective, we've seen ticket volume go down by at least 10 percent, and that was happening right after a data center move where, obviously, there was a spike. Directly after starting to use Cloud Insights and the associated Active IQ to monitor the storage, it helped bring down the time to identify storage nodes that were heavily affected or needed to have some adjustments made. The right-sizing has only reduced soft costs. The cost perspective of storage is a long-term thing where you say, "Okay, I've been able to move stuff over and have deduplication rates increase." But that takes a while.

Cloud Secure is definitely the most valuable feature and being able to see file level activity. It gives real-time alerting on possible ransomware attacks and provides file security review. It helps us to see if something abnormal is happening on the system before it's too late.

Since it is cloud-based, it can be accessed from anywhere. That is good because we can check up on any types of issues affecting our on-prem equipment. Being able to look at that from anywhere has been very efficient.

As I went through learning the querying, it could have been a little more intuitive. I'm still fresh into the system.

In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial. Getting that, out-of-the-box, would be helpful.

There is training that has been provided. I just haven't gone through all of it yet.

I have been using NetApp Cloud Insights on and off for about two to three months.

The stability has been good. As long as we have good connectivity and communication with the portal, everything works fine. We haven't experienced any downtime.

From what I've seen, there have been no scaling issues. The only limitation when scaling is licensing. As long as you have the money to license it, it will scale out as much as necessary.

Right now, we are just collecting data and we don't have any formal reporting out of it. We have used it more for ad hoc reporting. But the plan is to integrate it with some of our IT compliance summaries to be able to report on access-control and protection analysis, on a quarterly basis.

Their technical support has been great. They understand some of the barriers, some of the things that we've run into, and it's been a very easy interaction. There aren't too many things that can go wrong with the solution. It's been great.

Their turnaround time, depending on the urgency, has been within a couple of hours. We haven't had an incident that involved the security side, but they've been very responsive. We usually open tickets via email for questions around usability.

We didn't have anything like this before.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very simple. I told it where the data collector should point to, and it just worked, right out-of-the-box. It took less than 15 minutes to set up. Once you put the data collectors in, you assign what they're collecting and that's it. Because it's a product of NetApp, it was very simple.

The deployment, from start to finish, was about an hour-long meeting. There were a couple things that my system admin had to do, deploying acquisition units, but that didn't take long at all. We have deployed a lot of stuff over the last year, and this was very simple in comparison.

I did not require an implementation strategy for this. It's an analytical add-on tool that just worked. I didn't run into the standard security issues or anything like that.

We have approximately six users on it. They're all within IT and provide information to either executive management or others. Their roles vary from my CIO down to my source storage administrators and my security admins. Storage admins and network admins are looking at it from a performance perspective. My security admins are looking at it in terms of ransomware and the access-control side. Those individuals are also responsible for maintenance. It's a tool that did not require additional staffing and was more of a benefit for the individuals in my group.

We worked directly with NetApp. It was a pretty straightforward meeting. They provided the requirements and we implemented it.

Be aware of the capacity licensing and understand how that works, because it is based on capacity. Getting an understanding of that is the biggest thing.

We did look at some other options, on-premise solutions for identifying, and we found that there were some problems with them. One of them was Varonis, but they were more security-related towards ransomware and identifying insider threats. With Cloud Insights you got that but you also got the performance enhancements through the ability to see how to tweak or manage performance of storage stuff.

We did do a trial with Varonis and ran into some problems with their collectors causing blocking issues at the time. We didn't feel comfortable with the results of that performance. We didn't see the same performance issues with this solution.

Work with NetApp to get the best support possible.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution has been understanding the relational side of things, how our nodes interact with each other, and how applications can affect multiple nodes in our environment. It's helped us to load balance to make our environment more efficient.

Because it was so easy to deploy I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

The main benefit of NetApp Cloud Insights is that it's agentless. It just collects information from the SNMP protocol.

We had NetApp ONTAP installed and we paired with VMware. The biggest challenge for any company is to find the bottleneck on the Edge of the technologies, like between VMware and NetApp. Both products have great reporting and monitoring tools, but whenever it comes to finding issues on the Edge between those products, you can hardly identify whether it's a storage issue or whether it's a virtualization issue. NetApp Cloud Insights greatly blends the performance data, approximates, links together the performance usage from the VMware and NetApp perspectives, and provides you a single pane of glass in terms of the reporting and monitoring through the virtual machine to the hardware storage.

You can find any major bottlenecks or any issue points you need to work on. In any IT infrastructure, whenever you improve, like if you buy faster storage, then you move bottlenecks from storage to the network or to the servers. The biggest challenge is to find where that bottleneck is to resolve the issue. I personally found NetApp Cloud Insights very useful in this sense because we were a heavily virtualized environment.

We were a heavily virtualized environment with the NFS Protocol, as our storage main Storage Protocol, we were able to easily nail, locate, and resolve some performance issues using Cloud Insights, which would have been very hard to identify. 

The biggest challenge though is the licensing model for Cloud Insights. For example, for our environment, the price of purchasing was close to the price of the storage itself, which is why we didn't actually pursue using Cloud Insights further. 

Cloud Insights has helped us to optimize Cloud spend by removing inefficiencies and identifying abandoned resources in VMware. There were a bunch of older virtual machines that were powered off and they were just left there, forgotten to be decommissioned. That was costing us premium storage space.

The visibility and usage optimization are the most valuable features. I liked the product very much. Its dashboards and the alerting systems are very easy to implement in any environment.

Its ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of your environment is brilliant. There is a price associated with it. Whenever you target a NetApp environment, it is included in the price but whenever you want to add different vendors, like VMware and Cisco, the price greatly spikes. Inventorization helps us a lot to visualize the environment.

It's priceless when you work with eight different vendors, in a multi-vendor environment and Cloud Insights can actually identify those links between VMware and physical servers and storage, and that helps to troubleshoot and solve issues right there. It helps to proactively make decisions.

Their advanced analytics for pinpointing problem areas are great. If you're using separate tools, for example, vRealize Ops manager and Unified Manager from vRealize from VMware and Unified Manager from ONTAP, you can find some anomalies in both of them, but you can never link them together in one logical structure. Unified Cloud Insights, however, really goes through and links them together. For example, if you have a contention, like virtual CMTS contention, it doesn't mean that your storage has issues. It also can mean that there is a network problem below or some faulty network adapter network port, or even a physical server. In this sense, Cloud Insights is very valuable. It enables you to find out multi-tiered issues.

Advanced Analytics also helped to reduce the time it takes to find performance issues. It just reduces the time to find issues. And it can predict issues which otherwise, would take hours or days to find.

Their pricing model needs improvement. 

We were testing Cloud Insights for a period of around five months. I installed it, configured it, and just didn't touch it for the first two months because I was busy. For the next three months, we actually used it to troubleshoot some issues and to gather more information on the performance of the environment. We found it very useful and helpful.

We have to install the collectors in your environment and then collectors send information into the NetApp private cloud.

It is a greatly stable environment. I didn't have any issues during my assessment time.

Scalability is also great. You just add notes and it works.

I only showed it to two or three people. The number of users doesn't impact the performance of Cloud Insights. It's more about how many connected devices there are.

We had a six node cluster and maybe around a thousand VMs.

We didn't use a solution like Cloud Insights before. We were just given a license with instructions and we extended the license three or four times. NetApp reached out to us and pitched the idea of how great Cloud Insights is. We liked that it offered the opportunity to work with a multi-vendor environment.

The free trial of Cloud Insights helped inform our buying decision. We found value in Cloud Insights.

We also use Datadog but it doesn't have the same functionalities as Cloud Insights. 

The initial setup is straightforward. You just spin-up the collector. I think one per vendor, one for NetApp, one for VMware, and then link them to Cloud Insights in the private Cloud. That's it.

You can spin-up the environment within an hour for the entire thing. You have the collectible information after the next hour, you will have your environment on a dashboard in Cloud Insights. 

The price that came back to us was so ridiculous that we didn't end up implementing it.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that basic licensing that is free, is useless. That is the biggest lesson. The basic free Cloud Insights does everything, but only with NetApp products, and this information alone doesn't add value to our troubleshooting.

I would rate NetApp Cloud Insights a nine out of ten. I really liked the product. I would have bought it if it wasn't for the cost. I had a perfect business case for it but it didn't work out.