NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

Performance monitoring of hundreds of switches and being able to see results in one dashboard.

With the alerts of saturation of FC ports in their early states, we can proactively anticipate performance issues on the server or databases.

Enhance SNMP monitoring in order to broaden the number of storages that can be discovered. Review the setup of the software and divide the DB from the application and web server. Also, modularize the software more.

Four years.

No issues.

Yes, because it has a unique server module.

It is very good with a quick escalation process and delivery of new patches in a couple of weeks.

We have used and currently use other SRM softwares, but this one is more intuitive and easy to manage.

Very straightforward. You need only to define how many collectors and enable the needed firewall rules.

I do not advise about pricing: For me, it is always too much. Licensing is on TBs, and I think, nowadays that is outmoded.

A storage with 100TB or more could be the minimum in some cases. The licensing should be reviewed in number and types of storages discovered.

I was not involved in the evaluation process. However, one is the compatibility matrix: the larger, the best.

Spend a little more time in design in order to save next time when the infrastructure is active.

It is the reporting functionality. We haven't gone to the extent where we are using the anomaly detection, but from a reporting perspective and single-pane-of-glass perspective, to look at our heterogeneous infrastructure, it is doing a great job.

Right now, it's our single pane of glass to monitor our entire infrastructure. It is the first point of troubleshooting where we go to see any anomaly, or for troubleshooting any performance issue. It's doing a good job so far. We're happy.

With a single pane of glass to look at, regarding any outage or any disconnect or regarding any TDP issues in our vSphere environment, we can go back and look at the data warehouse and see any changes in the infrastructure; like a port going offline or a port flapping. That's something that we haven't had the flexibility to do before, so that's the number one addition to our infrastructure.

It's the interop matrix. And if there was a chance to orchestrate on a heterogeneous structure using OCI, that would be a great start; or at least a plugin to each one of them, that would be a great start too.

Also, right now we don't have any management functionality using OCI. It's all about monitoring.

We have floor automation but I don't think we can include heterogeneous components into that. If there was a solution or plugin on OCI which could give us that functionality, where we could manage heterogeneous data sources, that would be great.

We had some issues when we upgraded OCI. Right now we are having an issue where the reporting functionality is looking at the numbers of other vendors in a different perspective, and we are having some issues with interpreting them. So our usable, on-the-storage array is different from what OCI is reporting to us.

We are an 18 to 20 petabyte environment. So far we haven't hit any issues where scalability was a issue.

We grew from 14 petabytes to 20 petabytes as of now. Maybe it's because of our relation with NetApp, we haven't had an issue with that so far.

We're happy so far. Whenever we are dealing with NetApp products, we have really good success. But when we are talking about other vendors like ENT or UCS - even now, UCS isn't supported on the interop matrix. That would be something which would look forward to be because we are a highly converged infrastructure. We have like 60 to 70% of our infrastructure on UCS so we thought that it being complaint in our OCI data sources - we're kind of missing a major chunk of our infrastructure.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for us are support and its foothold in the market. If you're talking about storage arrays, it's the federation and the high availability components. Recently we had some mishaps where we had outages. So, high availability of the array is a big decision-maker for us.

I gave it a six out of 10, not because the company is doing anything bad but taking simplicity into consideration, it's not simple. OCI works such that you get out of it what you invest in it. So if you know what to make out of OCI, you can get really good reports and really good insight into your infrastructure. But it's not that simple. It needs to be simple, more intuitive.

We have had great success with OCI from the reporting perspective, but when it comes to other heterogeneous data sources, there might be some disconnects. So we need to look at both OCI and the vendor-specific tools to get the actual numbers and get some understanding of it.

The most valuable feature of OCI is the ability to correlate a lot of different data sources together. It's very difficult to get a picture from just looking at the storage view. The fact that it allows you pull in your VMware information and the like, and see it all together, helps when you have an incident. You can correlate all that data together, and that's very valuable.

It's improved the organization in that, when people complained about an issue in the past, we had to go to all these different systems to look at the performance data; going into vSphere, going into SolarWinds. This ties it all together in one place so that we can get to the root of the problem more quickly. That makes the business happy because then we're not churning on trying to figure out what caused their performance problem.

I think there's still a piece of it that's external, the Java interface. I think that's all starting to get integrated into the whole HTML5, and once it's all integrated together, I think that's probably going to be better. I'm looking forward to that.

I think one of the weaknesses is pulling in systems outside of virtual environments, of physical hosts, and the like. I think it's something they're working on from what I've heard. But being able to look at some other things outside of what we typically monitor - we have some physical AIX environments. They can look into it a little bit but there's more that I can see being done in some of those outside-systems for virtualization. For virtualization and NetApp it's great, but for pulling in other sources where we're using NetApp storage, we're looking to get a little bit more data out of it.

I think in the most current versions it's been improved considerably. We did have some hiccups in some of the earlier versions with data collection getting missed sometimes, but I think it's definitely been improving over time and getting better and better.

With the latest version of OCI which we just installed, we haven't been seeing any of that anymore, we're not seeing any data collection issues, so it's been much, much better. The experience is better, the UI is getting better, it's all slowly getting better.

I don't know if I can say too much about that. We have a very specific size, we're medium size. I can't see us scaling up very fast, but from what I've seen, it seems like it should be able to.

I haven't personally used tech support for OCI but I have colleagues who have. I don't think they have any complaints about it.

We had used some solutions in the past, SolarWinds, just looking at vSphere monitoring, and we didn't have any one solution that pulled it all together. While SolarWinds is pretty good, the polling intervals are quite long, so if you want to get to a real fine-grained time period, where you want to look at a problem and have all these different systems, we really need something that would have like BI capabilities to get more data into it.

I think it was pretty straightforward. I think it was very quick to pull in data sources from all the different things that we monitor. I don't remember having any hiccups or trouble getting all the data in and getting it set up.

We were looking at - I believe it's now Brocade - but it was Riverbed that had a solution, and that had some dynamic performance monitoring. But I think OCI probably just made sense because we're using NetApp and vSphere most heavily, and it seemed to tie into it the best, of everything that we looked at.

When we select a vendor, we look for somebody who is innovating in whatever their marketplace is, and that has a good forward thinking strategy. Somebody who is leveraging good interface technologies, because interface is super important when you're just trying to get in and get something quick; somebody who is using HTML5 and that has fast response time, that's really important to us.

I gave it an eight out of 10 for some of the reasons I said before. The interface isn't fully tied together, there's still some pieces that are outside of the web interface. But, with all the other improvements, I can't complain too much about the actual functionality, setting up dashboards and looking at the performance data.

I would just day be aware of everything that you're looking to monitor, to see if it makes sense to use it. If you have a lot of systems that don't fit into the OCI infrastructure, then you might want to look around a little bit more. But if you're using NetApp specifically, and you're looking at a lot of the technologies that integrate closely with OCI, I think it's a good fit. But really, the best thing to do is to look at something that fits the technology that you have.

The ease of use, because we don't have much time to learn all the new things.

The things we're able to derive, we're able to use that and figure out what the next steps would be that bring value to the company, or our organization. We get strategic insights and plan ahead.

Perhaps integration with other platforms; any other monitoring, other kinds of storage platforms.

It's OK so far. I don't think we push it to the limit of what it can do, so I think it's been pretty stable for us. It's been pretty good so far.

We haven't really found time to upgrade it, so we've been pretty happy with where we're at. I forget what version we're at. But so far it's been OK.

Like I said, we don't push it too much. We're using it for a few things and that's pretty much it.

We don't look at it from that perspective. We don't have a lot of devices that we monitor. So we don't need it from that perspective.

I think one colleague has used it once, maybe twice, that's it. I, personally, have not.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criterion for us is how easy is it to work with them. Our group is very small. We really don't have time to do a lot of back and forth with the vendors. It's either they want to deal with us or they don't, period. If they want work with us, we go ahead. If not, then we move on.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, again, we're not pushing it as much as we probably could and should. I think if we got down to knowing the nitty-gritty of it, we'd probably like it a lot more. But like I said, we just don't have time to use it that much.

If I were to advise a colleague at a different company who is looking at OCI and other similar solutions, I would say know the functions or features you want to use. Outside of that, do what we did not do, really try to get to know the product and do a deep dive into it.

The ability to collect data from every other manufacturer like NetApp, HPE 3PAR - all the different storage products.

I can get the overall usage, performance and, later, we see all the details across the board.

I think there was an issue with the actual usage of some of the storage, so that could be a little bit more detail we can get in to.

Also helpful would be cloud integration or even assessment in going towards, "Will this footprint be viable to move to the cloud?" That's an option we are thinking would help.

Pretty good so far. We've collected a whole bunch of stuff and we are looking to go forward and assess what we really need in terms of storage, because it is helping us on that one.

We have not had a chance to do that at this point. We have a certain set of systems and we are using it for so far.

Yes, we have used tech support, and they are excellent. We have engineers set up for us and we have dedicated SEs, so they come and help us out instantaneously.

We had individual siloed applications, utilities. 3PAR had one and VMAX had one, NetApp had one, so we had DFM etc. Each of those had each feature and function. Not as detailed as OCI.

At this point in time we are trying to consolidate our storage infrastructure. So this is a pretty good way to do it because they cross multi platforms and the like.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

It was very simple, they gave us preparation for the user IDs and the like and we were able to put that in and it came in, right through. It took some time to come up with the data, the initial data and that was it, it was done.

The option there was HPE OneView. We were looking at it but I think NetApp came out much more detailed.

When selecting a vendor to work, the most important criteria for me are

• response time
• knowledgeable staff
• detailed reports

and those all worked out pretty well.

It has given us a lot more information than what we could have done ourselves, or with other products.

Look at the product. I mean it has got a lot of features, functionalities, which individual products by the individual manufacturers do not give you. It has an overview of the whole estate, in effect.

As it crosses multi vendors, it's not difficult to put features to or from administration staff, so I think I am good with what we have today.

It's a good, single place to go to see the storage performance on all of our clusters.

It's able to simplify looking at performance on all of our clusters, all of the nodes, all the volumes, in one place, without having to log into each individual storage array and look at it.

Right now it monitors our entire datacenter, all the different Pure Storage as well as NetApp. It does multiple vendors. Its only drawbacks are it's expensive and the upgrades are somewhat difficult.

It would be better if they could simplify the upgrade process. It's long and tedious. You have to be careful, or you could shoot yourself in the foot.

We've had it for about three or four years and it's very stable, no issues.

You license it for whatever you need. It can scale out whatever you need to monitor.

We've added additional licensing to it. It's licensed by the amount of storage that you use, so we've purchased additional licensing.

It's very good. The guys are sharp, they know the product very well and get back with you in a quick amount of time.

We've had no issues whatsoever with escalating.

It was complex, and that's why we brought in Professional Services to get it up and running for us.

The product is very involved. There are a number of different modules so it takes a little bit of a learning curve to get up to speed on it.

Primarily we use it for chargeback, but we also get some performance out of it as well.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria for us are

• dependability
• honesty
• good integrity
• reliability.

I'd say go for it. OCI is a good product if you can afford it.

Being able to immediately look at my data. See the sizing, where I'm at on different virtual machines.

Also, the most important thing, is IOPS. We have people - we support their applications - that are all the time complaining about slowness. So we can go in and say, "Oh, you need to moved over to this node or this node". OCI is perfect for that.

OCI has grown a lot over the last few years and we didn't realize until a few weeks ago, when we had our workshop, how powerful it really is, that it can actually automate and move stuff around for you in some ways.

The biggest thing though, is just being able to get a visual, overall view of your environment to see if this node is being hammered or if this storage is filling up really fast. Just being able see it at a glance, when I come in in the morning, I'm drinking my coffee and say, "Oh, this place is about to fill up I need to move this." That's key. That makes sure there are no "gotchas."

In addition, I get emails - I guarantee I have emails right now from OCI - that say, "Hey, we had a node that got over subscribed." Then, "Oh, its cleared now," that kind of thing. That's really nice because I'm never surprised, in the middle of the night if I get a call, I can look down at my email and say, "Oh, yeah there's a reason you're calling me, because that node is down or we're having issues with that."

We do a lot of databases within that app and we had a problem with a lot of our databases running slowly. Once we got OCI, we started seeing where the IOPS were really failing us. We actually found that we had built some machines too big.

Everything's got to be scaled to size and we actually found that out by making some of the machines smaller; and some of them did better on SATA instead of SaaS. But all that we found from OCI. It helped us improve the application side for what we call our customer, basically another Navy employee who is running, say, a database for time clocks. They would say, "I'm having people that are complaining, when people are punching in they're not able to go to work because it's not coming back as fast."

So we were able to improve those kind of speeds and help people service our Navy personnel faster, better, and more efficiently.

Maybe a little bit more graphical interface. Right now - and this is going to sound really weird - but whatever the biggest server is, the one that is utilizing the most storage space, instead of showing me that server and how much storage space, it just shows it to you in a big font. Literally in a big font. That's it. So if your server is named Max and you've got another server named Sue, and Max is taking up most of your space, all it's going to show is just Max is big, Sue is little. That's is really weird, because I really want to see more than that. You can click on Max, drill down in and see the stuff. But I would rather, on my front interface, say, "Oh, gosh, Max is using 10 terabytes. Sue is only using one. She's fixing to choke. Let me move some of this over."

You can build those out, but initially when you bring up the dashboard, that was one thing they couldn't take away. They couldn't change that. It just looks kind of kludgy. I'd like it to look a lot more clean when I first login.

It would help if it could be a little more user friendly at the beginning. Show me a little bit more that I need to see, that I find more relevant, without me having to build out templates. Maybe even have a drop-down that says you've already got the data there. But it would be a lot easier if I could just build the template out myself and, right now, I don't feel like we're comfortable doing that. We had to bring somebody in to do it.

I've never ever had a problem with OCI. It's never gone down, it's never crashed. As far as stability, we've never taxed it. It's a workhorse.

Again, it's a workhorse. When we started out, we had a very small virtual environment, maybe a 100-150 servers. We're up to about 700 now. OCI has just kept growing with it. It's been able to keep up. It's never once said, "Oh, I can't handle that many."

About the only thing we run into a problem with is licensing, sometimes. You may get too many things talking to it and they'll say, "Hey, you didn't really pay for that many licenses." But, at the end of the day NetApp will do whatever it takes to keep you up and running. They're not going to shut you down. So scalability is awesome.

I have used it for OCI. We had a couple of issues when we were setting it up, from the database perspective. We called into help desk. We opened a ticket with OCI. They actually sent a guy out to help us with it, which was amazing. To not charge us for Professional Services, but send a technician onsite to help us fix it was awesome.

I can't say enough about NetApp support. They're fantastic.

Our sales guy that came in, a wonderful guy, told us OCI was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He has an SE, he and I just hit it off. It was really his interpretation of OCI that sold us on it. It was the SE more so than the sales guy. It was more or less just a one-on-one with that guy that made me understand that it's not a lot of bull, that it was the real deal. So that's what sold us on it.

I was involved in the initial setup.

OCI, three and a half years ago was in its infancy, or for us it was. According to the guys who built it, they had a lot of problems at the beginning. There were a lot of templates that we needed within OCI that we didn't get. When we would go into OCI, we weren't seeing a lot of the data that we needed to see. It went on and on and on. They sent the same technician out every time and he just didn't seem to quite grasp what we needed.

About a year ago, they sent another technician out. He sat down with us. We drew out everything we wanted. Bada-bing bada-boom, literally within just a few hours he had all the templates impemented.

But a lot of it, as he said, was because it's a lot easier now to implement OCI than it was back then. Back then it was a lot more hands-on, command line stuff. Now, it's a drag and drop type of deal. If I want to see the IOPS on a server I can drag it over, drop it, and then it works. Whereas before, you had to build a template out for some of the stuff.

Our initial experience with OCI wasn't good. But, we stayed with it. Eventually it became something we use every day. We love it, we absolutely love it.

We didn't know that there was anything else out there. Balance was their predecessor. We used the heck out of Balance. Balance was free but it became an unsupported product. OCI we bought, but we couldn't, like I said, at the beginning, get OCI working. So we were relying a lot on Balance. One day they pulled the rug out from under Balance and said, "We're done." That's when we really started looking at OCI hot and heavy.

When I look at a vendor, generally I look to see if I feel like I'm being fed a lot of bull or are they really talking to me. I look for a vendor that genuinely takes interest in what we're doing and sells you something you need. That was one of the things that impressed us about our sales guy. When he came in, we were looking at a much bigger NetApp environment. He told us,"I would love to sell you that, but you don't need it." It's those kind of people. When you come in and you actually tell me what you think I need and I say, "Oh, but I want to buy this widget," and it's real expensive, and they say, "But you don't need it," that's when I know you're trying to help me out, size it up, make it more functional for me.

But also, I want to make sure I can grow with it. So, I look for honesty in a vendor, if that's the right word. But you usually have to sit and talk to him for a while before you finally figure out if they're here just selling me a load or they're actually telling me what I need to hear.

If you'd asked me three years ago, I would have given it a one out of 10. Today I give an eight. I love it. They need to change the GUI interface at the very beginning, but I love it. I think it's a great product. I'm completely turned around. I'm 100% on board with OCI now.

I would say that if you've got a large virtual environment with a NetApp storage - OCI is written by NetApp - it would almost be silly to look elsewhere. You can look at other storage solutions like EMC, but if you're pure NetApp like we are, there is no other tool like OCI. It does everything. It has all the hooks because the people that built the product are the people that make OCI. It's going to do more for you than an EMC or something like that.

The fact that it gives us a way to report usage for the arrays that we have, issues that we have.

It's a reporting tool so we can see where we get issues with latency, and we can see issues with port saturation, and it shows us each of our clients.

Personally, some of the older things that HPE created originally, you could dig a little bit deeper into each client in certain ways that OCI doesn't quite do.

With HPE we could look at very specific port-to-port on there, per array that we have. Whereas the OCI, you can still do that but the way it's done is a little bit... When I look at a host, I can't look at the entire host. I can only look at different LUNS on that host and that can be a problem sometimes.

A year and a half now.

Stability is good. No issues with OCI.

It's got some things that are good and we still use some other reporting tools to mix in with it, but it is good overall.

I have not used it.

I was not involved.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria are what's easiest, what's quickest to train on and that way we can get into all of the different engineers' hands and get them up to speed fastest on it.

Functionally we're able to use it to troubleshoot pretty quickly. So it's come on and it's replaced a lot of the HPE tools that we were using before. What would make it a 10 out of 10 for me are some of the niche things that we would want to see, so that it could do some of the troubleshooting even a little bit better and a little bit faster.

For troubleshooting, for the way we use it, it's good. And for a large environment, it seems to have been integrated in pretty well.