NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

What I found most valuable in NetApp OnCommand Insight is that it gives me a complete view of the environment, particularly an end-to-end view. I can locate my searches and view my storage devices. I can also find my recent servers and other host devices. I can then map all those into a single view, so that I can learn about the performance of my devices, or if there's a bottleneck at a particular place. I like that I can view all those information in NetApp OnCommand Insight. I like that very much.

I also like that NetApp OnCommand Insight has a very good interface that allows you to create and customize reports, and it also offers a bundle of reports as well.

NetApp OnCommand Insight is a pretty good tool, and the only concern I have with it is the price. Its price is quite high and could be improved because the licensing feature of this particular tool is on a per GB basis instead of the price being for the complete tool itself. The more you discover, the more you need to pay, and this makes NetApp OnCommand Insight more costly when compared to other tools which are available in the market.

My company doesn't have a cloud environment, so all storage is on-premises. I'm not aware of the integration of NetApp OnCommand Insight with the cloud environment, but the tool fits all the marks in terms of what I require and need. It checks all columns for me, so at the moment, nothing comes to mind in terms of additional features I'd like to see from the tool in the future.

I've worked with NetApp OnCommand Insight for around three or four years now.

NetApp OnCommand Insight is a stable software and I didn't see any issues in terms of its stability.

I didn't see any issues with NetApp OnCommand Insight in terms of its scalability. I was also looking into what would be a good replacement for the ViPR SRM and this tool was the only one that checked all the boxes, and my company has petabytes of storage. There's no issue in relation to the scalability of NetApp OnCommand Insight.

I've never experienced any issues any time I contact the technical support team for NetApp OnCommand Insight. My company has an on-site NetApp representative to whom all issues are communicated. The NetApp representative also has weekly meetings with my company and he aligns everything quite well, so on a scale of one to five, I would rate NetApp OnCommand Insight technical support a five.

Neutral

The initial setup for NetApp OnCommand Insight is simple. I can install the tool on any other servers if there's a prerequisite and if you go to the interoperability matrix, you'll just need to stick to that. Once you install it, you can get it done on a single server, so it doesn't require any number of servers, compared to ViPR SRM where my company has thousands of servers in the backend to support that particular tool. I can install NetApp OnCommand Insight on a single server and get the environment up and running very quickly, so as your environment grows, you can just increase the resources in that particular server, and even if it has a lot of features, you can add the tags into the devices. If you want to do reporting, you can also use the tool or use OnCommand Report.

Pricing for NetApp OnCommand Insight could be cheaper. On a scale of one to five, I would rate its price a four.

I've compared NetApp OnCommand Insight with several tools. One is a tool for heterogeneous storage monitoring, and I've also compared it with EMC ViPR SRM and RxScan. I've also evaluated IBM tools, but NetApp OnCommand Insight is the best.

EMC ViPR SRM has lots of issues in terms of the uptime, and device discovery, and its operational issues are quite high. In the petabytes of storage being managed by my company, there are thousands of ViPR SRM backend servers for the collector servers, and I can only discuss ten to fifteen devices among the collector servers, yet my environment has thousands of devices because it also has discovered servers, and there are around 25,000 to 30,000 devices which I need to discover, so I require thousands of servers as collectors to monitor if the server is up or down, which server isn't reporting, and when was the last report.

EMC ViPR SRM also has performance issues and its reporting is very scattered. My company has multiple front-end servers and there's the need to integrate reports onto another server if you want to try to run certain reports. Because of performance issues, even executive level reporting isn't being sent. There are a number of issues with EMC ViPR SRM that you won't experience when you use NetApp OnCommand Insight.

In terms of NetApp products, I've worked on seven earlier and now mainly onto the cluster mode devices. I've worked on multiple heterogeneous storage monitoring tools such as EMC ViPR SRM, NetApp OnCommand Insight, OnCommand Unified Manager, and even work automation and other related tools.

I would love to give NetApp OnCommand Insight full marks or a perfect rating, but I'm giving it a nine out of ten. I've analyzed multiple tools and I need to give suggestions to the customer to do the POC, and I also need to identify the differences within the multiple tools, so I evaluate five or six different tools for heterogeneous storage monitoring, alerting, and reporting, and then there's NetApp OnCommand Insight.

I primarily use OnCommand Insight to look at the entire stack within an organization of storage, fabrics, virtualization applications, and bare metal servers that would have agents attached. I also use it to identify workloads, size virtualization environments, and provide a CMDB of all devices with performance and capacity configuration information. 

OnCommand Insight's most valuable feature is the ability to see figure applications - you can tag applications in all the different elements of an application and have it in a single view so you can see bullies and victims and get to the root cause of problems in the environment you would otherwise be unaware of.

OnCommand Insight is really limited compared to what Cloud Insights is doing. It lacks AI to protect against ransomware and identify users accessing things abnormally.

I've been using OnCommand Insight since 2016.

OnCommand Insight is scalable.

The initial setup is pretty involved - typically, the customer needs to go through a pretty lengthy process of installing SQL servers and about two to three different servers to be able to substantiate even in a small environment.

I would rate OnCommand Insight eight out of ten.

We use OCI for tracking our capacity needs, our performance metrics, and future planning on the capacity trends. Recently, we've started integrating other vendor storage devices into the OCI. That is a key thing for us because that gives us integration with a single interface, where you can see what is trending and the overall performance.

It has definitely improved our organization. For example, we have, in total, 46 data centers and we're trying to make them into four or five data centers. OCI has helped us integrate all the other vendors into one OCI. We are trying to see what its usage is around a specific time. Since we know what the capacity usage trend is, we can try to buy storage in our data center with NetApp storage and then we can establish that within NetApp.

I've found the performance and capacity trends to be the most valuable features. The solution gives us usage reports. For example, if there's some kind of a peak, it can tell us certain times that usage will go up and come back down. 

We are getting into the public cloud right now. We have the storage area, and the future plan is to get that integrated into this one. We also have the PoC already running. The down-end is in place for us for the ONTAP Cloud Manager. There's cost, so once we know that we are full-fledged going to use it, then we plan to integrate that with OCI.

We would like to see some kind of email mechanism to send email alerts with system updates. Also, perhaps OCI could send a graph that gives yearly or quarterly reports.

The stability is good. There are certain version compatibilities. We have an Oracle ZFS system and it wasn't compatible with the OCI version that we have. We upgraded to a new system and it was still not compatible. A little bit more information from technical support would give us a little bit more insight.

We have hundreds of systems added to the OCI, and I haven't seen any problems so far: no performance, VM, or applications crashing. I'd say it's good. 

Technical support is good. We are a big customer for NetApp, so I know that we get priority support from them. Even if something is not prioritized, we have a dedicated SAM and a dedicated systems engineer from their side. Everyone's on top of things like that. We have never had any problems with support.

We upgraded the OCI and that wasn't complex, it was so simple. 

We have a reseller named Informative. The experience with them was great.

We have saved significantly by using OCI. I don't know the exact amount but it's more than a million. 

Since implementing OCI, our mean time to resolution has changed by around 20 to 25%

I would rate this solution a ten because of its ability to integrate with multiple systems. This gives me better performance numbers and gives me more information about where my loopholes are, where I need to target my customers, where I need to go back and retain storage. 

OCI is by far a really nice product as compared to competitors. I know that this solution is better than others. 

Our primary use case is for Oracle, SQL, and seismic data. We use it as NFS mounted storage and also replicate to another location (or SnapMirror it). It's just storage right now.

It houses our most important data for the whole Gulf of Mexico. As a whole, it works on the most critical data on NetApp right now. So, it's critical.

The cost, reliability, and support are great features.

We are in New Orleans, so being able to SnapMirror, moving the data to another place protected. Also, Snapshots have been very helpful. These are helpful because we are in a hurricane zone. We test SnapMirror every year by doing disaster recovery tests in April.

We do our Mirrors every hour. Within four hours during the last hurricane, we had our basic infrastructure up in Houston. We had stuff that we could bring up, so our data was protected, which is what it is all about.

There are other admins who use a lot of the features, like FlexGroup and SnapMirror restore volumes, along with the dev and test stuff. So, we use a lot of the components.

I am very happy with the stability. When your customers don't notice anything wrong, that's the biggest win for a product. 

We have like three or four petabytes, but we can use a lot more than that. As an example, back in 2012, we had about 13 racks of it, then we went down to three racks. Recently, we went down to one and a half racks and got more space than we had with those 13 racks, which was only six years ago.

We didn't even buy the solid state stuff this time. We just bought the 10 terabyte drives this time, which is pretty cool. The scalability goes way beyond anything we need. 

We have an advanced support agreement and a good relationship with our NetApp support team and systems engineer, whom we call up and open cases if we have questions. We also have our own internal company group that has a lot of NetApp people who can help.

We have had some problems on weekend and the middle of the night. They have even written code for us on the fly within a few hours to address an issue that we were having. We receive 24/7 coverage. 

We have a monthly meeting with our customer support people through NetApp. They go through all the cases with us, and we analyze everything. They help us with the upgrades. We tell them, "Treat our data like their data." So, they come down and meet with us, they fly to New Orleans, and if they see something they don't think is right, they tell us. That's a great relationship, when different companies act as one.

In 2001, we switched from LSI Logic. We were sort of building storage on a cheap at the time. Anyway, a guy who used to work here suggested NetApp, though it was certainly more per gig or megabyte at the time. 

You pay a little bit more but you get enterprise storage. You don't have anybody upset that they lost something nor do you have downtime. In the old days, you could reboot something in middle of the day and everybody would be sort of be okay. Now, they freak out. So, downtime is not acceptable anymore. Whatever it costs, we're going to have to pay for it. 

When we first went to Cluster Mode, we had a lot of problems. Setup took a few months. We had people onsite, including one of the top guys from NetApp for a while. Going from 7-Mode to Cluster Mode was rough. However, the last couple of upgrades to Cluster Mode have been fine.

The newest release was a lot easier, especially now that they're talking about their upgrades being more frequent. The whole non-disruptive upgrades can be scary because they are not 100 percent guaranteed. While it's always a little scary doing all non-disruptive upgrades, they have worked out well.

When we buy the equipment, we buy NetApp's technical support time. This last time, we received 30 days of their time and only used about five days, but over the next five years we will use that time up. 

They were great and helped with the deployment.

We have seen ROI. We still have an OCI on one of our drill ships and some of our platforms in the Gulf from 2012 and 2013 running on 7-Mode. We have had to extend the service maintenance time on them. These products are extremely durable and last over time. They are designed to take a beating.

We have saved money using the dedupe and compress. The price per gig has gone down, so it is easy to upgrade every three or four years, and say, "We can get twice as much data for half of what we paid for it." We just bought two systems. I probably paid as much for one system four years ago as I did for two now.

We like that it is one license and everything is bundled in together.

We just made a major investment back in May of this year, so we'll have it for another four and a half or five years easily. Thus, we have a five year bumper to bumper agreement.

The last dozen years, nobody's been on our storage list. It used to be Digital Equipment Corporation, but that was so long ago.

NetApp is a major player. You should look into them. Their service around the world is incredible along with their support. 

OCI is moving at light speed. They are doing a good job on the trends.

I am looking at he NFS in the cloud and Cloud Volumes.

We use it to provide storage for our clients.

NetApp gives our clients the best infrastructure with fast and easy administration. NetApp products are easy to use.

The most valuable feature is the security. When we identify a vulnerability, it is easy to mitigate it. NetApp provides the solution.

It's also easy to create and move volumes.

I would like them to develop voice commands so that I can say to the product, "Create a volume."

It's very stable. We have few problems with NetApp products and we have them in multiple companies: Modelo Group, Volkswagen of America, Volkswagen Argentina, and Volkswagen Mexico.

We can get support through their webpage or by calling and the support is good. They respond quickly, based on whether it's priority 1, priority 2, priority 3. In general, support is very fast.

The older products were medium-complex to set up but the new products are easy to set up.

Because of the stability of the product, we don't have problems.

I administrate IBM, Dell EMC, and NetApp, and I prefer NetApp.

IBM is very stable, but I prefer NetApp because it's more stable and secure.

We use it to identify cold storage, hot storage, that kind of data. We have multi-protocol: file shares, blocks, etc.

We have not implemented in a full-fledged way yet, but we expect OCI will be beneficial in helping us save on costs.

The most valuable feature is definitely the reports, the complete analysis of the data. We also like the scalability, since it can work with Hitachi, Isilon, etc. That's also a very useful part of it.

We have traditionally been customers of NetApp, we have it all over the enterprise. So far it is satisfactory. But I would like to see NetApp focus more on availability and customer support. From 7-Mode to C mode a migration happened and many features, like FTP and SFTP, were dropped. We have been using it, but there needs to be better communication when features are dropped because there are end users using it who might find it a shock: "Oh, why was that dropped?"

It's absolutely stable.

It can work with any protocol, with any vendor, any type of data or storage solution.

The tech support is pretty good. They helped to set up multiple controllers, and then we started with the analysis and the reporting.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The initial setup was good.

We used NetApp only. We worked with John Russell. He's definitely a good guy.

We have not yet saved money using the solution, but if we can implement auto-tiering, which is part of 9.5 and onwards, we will see great savings afterward.

We have evaluated other organizations, like Hitachi and Dell EMC.

OCI is a very strong product, it has so many features and a handful of features that are really good, such as analytics and the reporting.

We are not yet using the machine-learning features of this solution but we would like to. One feature we are using is the ServiceNow integration for infrastructure mapping but we're facing some troubles with it. ServiceNow has recently implemented sending an automated trigger or incident creation to ServiceNow from NetApp, and we are facing trouble due to the APIs. In terms of MTTR, we haven't calculated it yet, since it's not in production. We have only done the PoC.

We have plans to implement, or at least evaluate, products like StorageGRID and FlexPool.

If a colleague was concerned about being burned by legacy storage management products that don't work as promised, I would tell him to migrate to the cloud. It's a better way to manage the data. We can't escape on-prem. Legacy is one of the best use cases for on-prem, but cold data could be moved to the cloud.

OCI is one of NetApp's best products. I would rate it at nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is VMware performance.

It makes it easier to log into the performance of VMware. Now, we are upgrading to Microsoft Hyper-V, so it makes it easier to see improvements.

The most valuable feature is the five minute review.

The machine learning features help me troubleshoot faster.

I would like to see better graphics. We have seen regular graphs and pie graphs. I am sure that there are better ways to show this information. The graphical settings should also be easier to use.

It's stable and gives good feedback on performance.

It has good stability.

I haven't used technical support because I haven't had any big issues.

I was not part of the initial setup or deployment.

The company has saved money by narrowing down issues faster using servers and performance.

If you are using legacy products, you should upgrade.

Look into different solutions. This is one of the best solutions out there. However, each company has their different standards and requirements.

Our company does use ServiceNow as part of our infrastructure mapping.

This is a very good product. I give it a thumbs up.

We use OnCommand Insight to manage our nine petabyte storage, including our EF-Series and a few FAS8060s and FAS8200s. We are using it to manage our storage across that entire array and track our "burn rate": 

• How much we're using each month.
• How much we are growing.
• How much we can save.

Once we gathered and saw what we were doing with everything, we saved close to a petabyte worth of data by being able to delete old data and move stuff around. Thus, we became more efficient.

It's exactly what we needed. It has helped us optimize our storage.

It gives us the ability to look at our storage and figure out what we are doing with it. Without it, we are sort of blind. We have all these different aggregates going on, and we don't know what's been stored where, so it allows us to look underneath the hood.

We would like to see additional online training.

It's extremely stable.

We've had no issues scaling so far.

NetApp support is always there. Our guy, Matt is amazing. I can pick up the phone anytime to talk him when I have an issue. A company may have equitable software, but no one beats NetApp's support.

We didn't have a previous solution. 

We are very NetApp heavy. This is the solution that they suggested, so we went with it.

The initial setup is complex. There is a lot of stuff to set up. I had to teach my guys a lot of things, so there was a lot of learning. Once they got the hang of it, they were good to go and all the training that NetApp and the reseller provided was on point.

We used a reseller, ClearShark. 

We use them for a lot of things. It is an amazing company.

Absolutely go with this solution.

I manage the team using the product, but I don't have hands-on experience with it.

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.