NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

• Reporting
• The way it pulls the data
• Performance analytics

Everything for it is just amazing.

Time to resolution has gone way down, especially when working with the current performance issue.

As an industry, the product is uniquely valuable because it can actually snap into multiple different products, not just NetApp. It can do multiple different products.

Just more features, to be able to dig a little bit deeper into what it can actually report on.

About a year.

There's some features that I'd like to see in it, but other than that it's great. Features that I would like to see are the ability to be able to dig in a little bit deeper, to where it can actually do Snapshots and get inodes. Certain things that it cannot do currently.

It is very hard to implement. It takes a long time to learn. It is very unique skillset.

It takes a little bit of time to get through to them, but once we did, they are very good about making sure they get whatever issue you are running into taken care of.

We were taking over from a previous company.

Performance data.

We can analyze the arrays overall performance down to a LUN level, very quickly, with this product.

It is uniquely valuable because it covers the entire industry, just not NetApp products, but also HPE and other vendors. We have a multi-vendor platform, so having a single solution to monitor all the platforms really helps us out a lot.

Setup could be easier with some more integration with other products, but that's not really a NetApp thing. That's really the other products and how they integrate back with NetApp.

Most of it is not them, it is how they communicate with other third parties. It is just the third parties, trying to get all the pieces to talk together correctly.

A little over a year.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good (we have scaled out previously), because you can have remote agents as well as just a central console.

It is very good.

We invested in NetApp because we didn't have a solution that covered all of our arrays and all the storage infrastructure that we had.

I was involved in the initial setup. I did the proof of concept.

It beats HPE products hands down in terms of initial setup. We were able to bring the OnCommand up in three hours, whereas it took 60 hours to bring the HPE solution up. So, it was a pretty hands down win for NetApp.

The Performance Manager: Where we get performance statistics.

It is about the best method we have right now that we have for monitoring our individual virtual machines.

We have the server team actually logging into it and looking at it now. It's a good way to tell right away if it's the storage or the virtual machine.

Just make it one product, not in pieces like performance and discovery. Stop having all these individual pieces. Pricing by terabytes, not the end of the world, and that's okay. Stop if I want this, I have to buy that. Just release it as a single product.

Eight years.

It has gotten a lot better. They have made upgrading it a lot easier. Upgrading used to be a bit of a challenge.

It scales pretty good. You can have quite a few clusters, etc., in one instance of Insight.

They do have good support.

We have opened cases periodically whenever they are continually taking features out of the client, the Java client, and they're moving them to the web client. I don't think they've done a very good job of explaining, which features are going where.

Then when they go to HTML 5 interface, where are they? For instance, I just experienced this a few weeks ago I had to open a case, because what I was looking for in the Java client wasn't there. I opened a case with NetApp, and our VaR - it was moved under what's called queries. They didn't know that's where it was.

So, we are not always reaching the right person, but when we do reach the right person, they are knowledgeable.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was a little complex because we put it in quite some time ago. It's gotten a lot less complex. Overall, this is a complex package, at least in terms of it's capabilities. That is why it's not free. It has a lot of customization that you can do, such as reporting things.

In our case, we needed a way to monitor our NetApp environment and we were able to get it at a very good discount. Otherwise, we probably would have struggled to afford it.

It gives visibility to the VMs.

It's really fragile. We try not to depend on it because every time we change something in our environment, it breaks. So reporting, performance, metrics, it takes a lot to keep this thing running. We have a really dynamic environment, meaning our machines are constantly being patched. They are constantly being rebooted, and OCI is not really that resilient.

I'd like it to be more stable, simpler, and get Java out of it.

Three years.

The stability is terrible. It breaks all the time.

The scalability is fine.

It is not great. It's hard to get experts on the phone that understand your issues with the product, it's kind of a niche market. OCI seems to be a niche and every time I get someone working with me, they seem to know some of it, but there's one guy over there who knows it all. It's very bizarre. With reports, there's one guy at the company who it seems can spit out reports, at least the ones that we've been recommended. It's a complicated tool.

It is hard to reach the right person who is knowledgeable about the tool. The product's complicated.

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

The cost: It is expensive as a solution. You need to be an expert to get anything out of it and we don't have that kind of expertise. It's not worth it for us to spend that much time learning it, so it would be better if it were simpler.

We went to C-DoT and it was thrown in on the deal.

The product we use in our datacenter, and mostly I want to know about our datacenter's situation. In terms of the performance, before it was kind of is slow but now it is good. And the UI is good, after an upgrade, now it's a 7.3, I think.

Has made our operations simpler. Helped to know our datacenter, every detail. Helped to view our company infrastructure very well.

I don't know, the product is very good. Maybe lower the price.

More than two years.

It's very stable, and high performance, I think that's a very a good product.

It maybe have crashed in some situations, but it was not very critical because they have very good HA function, and the auto support is very good. It may be because we should have upgraded but didn't.

That's good support. The response time is very quick. They have good documentation. They also respond by telephone and contact us directly.

No.

It was very easy. No problems.

We chose this solutions because of our datacenter. We usually monitor our datacenter and have to check and everything.

Scalability: If you're from a large enterprise, it's easy for us to go into customer environments and pull the data out. It's very security-friendly. There's also the reporting suite, and the extensibility of that is fantastic. As well as we can replicate charge reports, so when you go from account to account it's always the same data. You're not looking at form A here, and form B there. We can actually have a standard set of reports globally.

The one thing that NetApp has done a very good job of is keeping up with the current technology out there, not just with what they're doing, but with what the industry is doing. When we have had to deploy something very quickly, this was several years ago, EMC released a new product, and we were the first people to have a functioning chargeback report in the industry, because they actually brought developers in, wrote the code, and allowed us to produce it. This ended being in the product.

Definitely, the single pane of glass for capacity management. Every customer has multiple vendors of storage, which allows us to bring those into a single report, deliver those, not just to engineers, but also to the operations level and business owners of those organizations as well, so they can make sound business and financial decisions.

It's uniquely valuable, because it's really at the top of its class. Everybody else who's doing storage, monitoring, and reporting, they don't have a standard base for doing this. They customize it for every vendor who's out there, whereas the NetApp approach was to build a base and a solid foundation, so regardless of what vendor you actually bring in, or new data source you add, it's always the same information. Therefore, you really can have a homogenous view.

The UI: They have been growing and changing. There's been some growing pains with that, but they are moving into the new HTML5 interface, which is fantastic. They are hitting on all the right points, but it's never going to be a perfect because there's always going to be something new, which means there's always going to be something that has to be improved.

About seven years.

It's very stable, but it's software and software breaks. That's just how it is. Overall though, we generally do not have issues with the software itself. It's usually some underlying infrastructure issue that causes an outage.

The architecture allows us to put the LAUs and roll them into a single reporting engine, either regionally and/or globally. Even though we have to add compute to monitor more storage, we don't have to go to different places to get that data, it all comes from a single point.

They're great. Fantastic. We generally deal with the same people, so that tells me that the way they manage the teams that people enjoy being there, and they stay. Also, they train their individuals, because when they look at the different data sources, the technology, they understand it. When they get into the product, they are very knowledgeable.

The instrumentation wasn't there, and that's what we deployed it for: storage, instrumentation, reporting, then accurate chargeback.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

Performance monitoring.

It is uniquely valuable because it lets you see everything from the storage to our virtual or VM environment. It does the whole path; it does storage, the fiber channel, the network, and the fee center.

We're not using it to its full potential, so it is hard to provide feedback here.

Two years.

So far, the stability is good.

I haven't looked into the scalability yet.

I haven't used technical support yet.

We purchased this solution because we didn't have anything to do trending, forecasting, or reporting.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

I used a NetApp engineer to implement it. The engineer's expertise was very good.

It's not vendor lock-in so I can collect data from different vendors, which is important for us. We are collecting data from Brocade, HP, NetApp, and EMC.

It gives us a better view of into what is happening with the environment, like performance issues or predicting problems. This is the most important part for us.

We can predict when storage will be out of space, so we can start buying before something bad happens.

It would be helpful if it were easier to create queries. It's not very intuitive.

We're still implementing so it's not in production yet; so two months only.

I don't know yet. We're still testing. For now, it's stable. No crashes.

It's just software, it's not a hardware, so I don't see that there will be problems in the future with scalability.

We haven't used technical support yet. We're still implementing so we haven't understood the architecture.

No, this is the first one. We needed to get a better view of our environment. Now we have a tube for collecting data and showing the manager the results.

We had NetApp on in our environment so we know it.

It was complex. It's new for us so there are a lot of requirements that we haven't had yet in other products, especially all these servers that we need to set for this application to run. That is not something that we usually do.

We need to prepare our environment for this product.

Our industry is healthcare but I think this product is valuable for everyone. I don't think it's uniquely valuable to our industry.