Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

70 to 90 percent of the use that we have for the solution is to get virtual machines running. We are also starting to use different aspects of Prism. For example, we just started to deploy their file storage solution. We weren't able to so far (within the last year), because there hasn't been much time to deploy projects on new technologies.

We do use the capacity planning. If we were to speak about the algorithm side of Nutanix, we use the compression algorithm for the compression that's in the storage and the storage deduplication algorithm. We find them really powerful. The capacity planning is a good algorithm, but it's a pretty simple one. It's just a projection of the expected growth of your cluster, so you can forecast if you need to buy more storage, compute, etc. 

The true power of the Nutanix algorithm lies within the storage algorithm: the deduplication, erasure coding, and compression. They are really powerful. We were actually quite surprised, because the experience we had before was only with storage arrays. Basically, when you buy a device that is purely dedicated to storage, you expect it to really perform in that area. That is pretty normal. 

When you buy a device, like Nutanix's hyper-converged solution, and it sells you on the fact that it has a really powerful algorithm for storage, you say, "Alright, it's like when you buy something that can do everything, but it's not really doing everything well. It's doing it okay." When we actually started pushing data on the Nutanix service, we saw that the compression was very good. We didn't expect it to be that good. Therefore, the algorithm for the storage side is well-thought-out and works really well.

The most valuable feature for us is the way we can use it with virtual machine to spin them. It is lightning fast compared to what we had before. The day-to-day tasks on a virtual machine are really fast. We have the economy of not having too much complexity in the menu and design of the solution, and information is accessible pretty quick. The best feature is really how simple it is to interact with virtual machines. 

The Prism features on the backup side have made it so much easier. Now, when we want to backup our VMs and do a cross data center backup, we utilize two clusters located in two data centers in Paris. For each virtual machine that is running, we have what they call a protection domain, which takes a snapshot of the VM and sends it to the other cluster. In the event of a cluster failure on one of the data centers, we can just press one button in another data center on another cluster in Prism. This will spin the VMs that have been backed up from the primary data center to the secondary one and make them run. It is a one-button recovery plan, which is pretty amazing.

There are a lot of features that could be added or, at least, made better.

There are two kinds of Prism. 

1. Prism Element: Which is what's installed on each cluster and running each cluster individually.
2. Prism Central: Which you use to connect to all your Prism Elements, meaning all the clusters. Then, it centralizes your view of your infrastructure. We have found a lot of bugs in the interface. Sometimes, when you do an action, it says to you that it's 100% done. However, in the background, the action is still ongoing, and you have no visual update on how long will it take. 

Just this morning, we took an image from Prism Central. That image was installed on one of the clusters. In Prism Central, you have one feature that enables you to place the image on multiple clusters. You just have to select them, and say, "I want my image of my virtual machine to be on all my clusters." So, when I want to spin a VM on an individual cluster, I will find the image. What is happening is that when you use the feature of image placement on Prism Central, you select the clusters on which you want to push the image, then you validate. Once you validate, it says, "Alright, the image update has been done successfully," but in the background, it's actually placing the image. Therefore, you have absolutely nothing visually that tells you whether it will finish soon or last a lot longer. You're just there, sitting and waiting for an update that you have to visually see on the interface by refreshing the interface. 

Imagine if you were to copy a file from one directory to another directory, but you have nothing to tell you whether it's ongoing or will take five minutes, ten minutes, or an hour. You just have to wait in the other directory for the file to appear and see that it's copied. This is not down to the functionality. It's down to the design of the user interface.

If you want to convert a virtual machine to an image, you have to do it via command line. Why is there not a button on the Nutanix interface that does this? 

We have been using it for almost a year.

The stability of the Prism solution is another thing that we have found to be a bit of work. For example, the Prism Central and the appliances use 97 percent of the CPU and RAM of the virtual machine. We don't know why. There is a memory leak somewhere that makes it overuse the memory. Nutanix is aware of this. It has been ongoing for a year, and they still haven't fixed it. I just don't get it.

Scaling is easy, rapid, and pretty straightforward. Now, we have two clusters consisting of 16 nodes on each cluster. If we were to extend the cluster, we would just order a new node, rack it, and image it to have the same version of the operating system off the Nutanix cluster. Adding it to the cluster is really straightforward. Then, Nutanix takes care of everything, because it's going to use the node to deduplicate blocks of storage. It's going to use the node to store VMs on the node. The automated services on Nutanix are really good.

There are mainly 20 users utilizing it, with a maximum of 30 users. We have a SysOps team, which does like Level 1 administration, who uses Prism for their day-to-day tasks, e.g. renaming the server, creating a new server, moving a server from one node to another node, or augmenting the capacity of the server to extend the disks, CPU, or RAM. There is also the SRE team, which is the engineering team, and we do the much more complex tasks. For example, when we work on the design of a new solution, we will present storage directly on the VMs. We do tasks that are a little more complicated than the other users.

I have been in touch with Nutanix support. They have been really fantastic. The only thing that is an issue is that we are in Europe, and when we open a ticket in European time, we get a response off-hours from India. If you are in Europe and you open a ticket during European business hours, you should probably get someone from Nutanix in Amsterdam who responds. Sometimes, we open a ticket up at ten o'clock in the morning and get a response on our ticket at five o'clock in the evening from India. How come it wasn't seen by the European teams first? It's a European company with a European headquarters. You have to specifically request for your tickets to be handled in your time zone for someone from Europe to contact you. 

We are the classical customer. Before, we were using a normal three-tier hosting solution, which consisted of having a stack of storage, a stack of network, and a stack of hypervisors for the compute and memory. We thought it was a burden to maintain, because every time when we had to do updates or security patches, we had three stacks to maintain. Whereas, when we switched to Prism, we benefited from its hyper-converged solution. This meant our time maintaining and keeping the solution up-to-date was divided by a great factor. That brought us to Nutanix.

We originally came from VMware. We also had some Hyper-V also, but we were originally a pure VMware customer for our virtual machines. I have used VMware for far longer than I've been in the IT industry. Nutanix was my first experience other than VMware. It is day and night for me. I would much rather use the Nutanix product line than the VMware one.

There were two factors for moving from VMware to Nutanix. 

1. We had to renew our infrastructure. It was getting a bit old, so we needed more power in order to also forecast the growth of the company. 
2. The simplicity of hyper-converged makes it a leader. For example, it's a bit like when you cook in your kitchen and have all the ingredients, then you have to assemble them and cook them. I compare Nutanix to those new machines that came out where you put all your ingredients together and you just press a button, then it cooks it for you. It is really a little bit like that. It is like everything is hyper-converged, so in one block you have your storage, compute, memory, etc. When you want to expand your cluster, e.g., if you want to add more VMs or more storage, then you just buy one block, plug it in, and link it to your cluster. That's it. You don't have anything else to do because it's all automated, where it was a burden before when we were under VMware.

This solution seems like going from a complex, cross-embedded solution to something which is a Next Generation website. The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products.

In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed. 

Nutanix suffers tiny glitches, when you put them one behind another, make the experience just a pain. However, the main features work well. There is no doubt of that.

The initial setup was straightforward: You receive the servers, you pick up the servers, and you rank them. Once you rank them, you plug them into your network. After that, you plug in your computer, you image the cluster, and deploy the appliances. It was a two-man, two-day job to deploy 32 nodes.

We did a high-level design, a low-level design, and a network design, respectively, then we opened the deployment project. It was pretty classical straightforward. Nutanix was pretty easy. The hardest part of the work was in thinking the design of what you wanted, e.g., how many nodes and clusters. We studied the capacity used by our old VMware infrastructure and forecasted the future growth of the company to integrate in how much Nutanix we were going to buy, how many nodes, and how much compute power. Deploying the actual physical hardware and cluster mechanics was easy. It was really a piece of cake.

When you deploy the cluster, make sure you set up the networking. This is really important. If you don't do it right, you will have to come back to it later, and that could be a pain.

Do the testing extensively before you go to production. We spent two days deploying and one full day just testing that the deployment was correct.

I was involved in the deployment of the clusters. I was in the data center to deploy the servers. I was there when we deployed the Prism appliance. I was involved every step of the way (from A to Z), even in the migration from VMware to Nutanix. 

The adoption rate is 90 percent. We also have some cloud and SaaS/PaaS services. Otherwise, the whole company sits on Nutanix. Right now, we have nine million users using our application and placing bets. At the highest peak, we can have a rate of thousands of logins a minute on our infrastructure. When there is big games, e.g., Champions League Games.

Imagine that we have a lot of people placing bets or surfing the website for the offer. Our infrastructure has to respond really quickly. For example, if a customer places a bet and the game finishes, we have to pay that bet quickly so the customer is able to replace a new bet for the following game, the day after, or something else. The stability of the infrastructure, its resiliency, and capacity to take in load is really important. 

Since we switched to Nutanix, we have had fewer bottlenecks and issues during the big game nights. We are using Nutanix and our infrastructure and rely on it for our business.

We have felt the ROI. We don't spend so much time on administration as we did before Nutanix. Before, it was fastidious to update all our VMware, clusters etc. We had to do that every three months. Right now, in Nutanix, it takes us half a day. It is one person who presses a button and goes onto some other business. Nutanix takes care of the update.

We're not using the Prism Pro solution; we are using Prism Ultimate. We have the highest level of license.

Be careful when you buy Nutanix. You get to choose if you're going with Dell, HPE, or Lenovo. Make sure you choose the right one for your company. The vendor is a critical step. 

Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me. 

We did an evaluation with HyperFlex, which is the Cisco solution. It wasn't good at all. Whereas, Nutanix is sending you a hyper-converged infrastructure, and what you see is, what you get. With HyperFlex, they're selling you the same idea, but once you get is not exactly what you expect. It's blocks that you have to assemble yourself in order to make it a hyperconverged solution, while Nutanix is truly a hyper-converged solution. Nutanix gives you the appliance and server, which you just rack and off you go. 

We tried using Nutanix Calm and Karbon for the Kubernetes cluster, but we didn't find them to be as easy to use as we expected. When we heard about Calm, we almost thought that we could do automation at a level that would be similar to Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack. When we looked at the features inside, it wasn't exactly like that. Since what we have to do is pretty complex, doing it under Puppet for the orchestration and things like that, this seemed to us much easier than doing it under Calm.

I think this was because communication was off from the Nutanix side and our understanding was off from our company side. We expected it to be a product that it was not, so we haven't been able to use it. We did try to have a look into Calm, but we haven't found a use case for the product. The use case that we have in the company requires us to direct to another product, which we decided would be Puppet.

We are heading towards a DevOps culture. What will happen is that we're going to head more and more towards hybid datacenters. We might increase our usage of Nutanix.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

I'm one of the administrators in our data centers. My title is Site Reliability Engineer, so my use case is that of a user and getting it to administer machines and monitor application performance.

The purpose for Nutanix, in general, was to reduce our footprint within our data centers, to scale down to a single point for all of our compute and storage, which it does very well. We're using Prism Pro to access all of the different clusters; we're able to get to them through one interface.

Based on information that we're able to derive from the application, we have utilized another monitoring tool, Splunk, and we're able to retrieve data on a frequent basis. We are able to find information about different VMs, or historical data regarding the process of those machines. That has been greatly beneficial for us to determine problems with our application; when machines move if there's an HA event and what those machines are; if there's a failure, what machines were involved in the problem, and where they're migrating to. It gives us a great deal of detail and it has helped improve our processes to determine where problems lie, where machines are going and what's happening with them, in near real-time. It's helped our troubleshooting process a great deal to have that information at our fingertips.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to find a machine, regardless of which cluster it's located in, as quickly as possible, and being able to work on it. A lot of times we are called upon to troubleshoot an issue. That usually means there's a problem that needs quick attention. Being able to find machines, ascertain their status, and do so in a timely manner, are processes that are very critical to our business needs.

I've used other products that are similar in nature and they can be very complex, but they have good documentation to back it up. Nutanix is no exception to that. Their documentation is quite extensive but can be challenging to read if you don't know the product firsthand. Still, it is very good at describing the features and functionality that you're looking for. But something to improve upon might be the ease of access to documentation, and helping users understand which information is going to provide the detail they need to complete their job.

The integration with Splunk is a little lacking, and this is something that we've worked on with Nutanix quite extensively in the last year or two. It didn't really have a good integration. They built some dashboards, where they were trying to kind of recreate Prism. Prism is its own utility; it works well for what it does. But it doesn't provide us quite the detail that we are looking for or the historical data that we were after. So we had to build our own custom apps for Splunk. Since doing that, we have been working with Nutanix to try and improve, to some extent, what they put out for the public. But in general, we've done some of our own customizing of our own dashboards. 

So the integration itself has not been great, but the work that we have done on our own towards Splunk has been really good. On the plus side for Nutanix is that the API calls it has that allow you to retrieve information about their product are incredible. The amount of data that you can retrieve is immense. The downside would be how to best utilize that data once you have it. That's where it's lacking, and I know that they're taking strides to improve that.

The types of data I'm referring to are CPU statistics, memory usage; when there's an HA event; where machines were located and where they're being moved to. At times, if a node fails or goes down for any reason, or there's a memory failure, it has to live-migrate those machines somewhere else. Being able to identify what those machines are, where they're going, and what impact that has to the infrastructure, is a real help to someone like me. That helps me to know what the impact is going to be to our clients and how quickly we can get the system back up to a stable and fully functional state. If we had a problem with the server, being able to look back in historical data and determine what led up to that event is another use for the data. We have roadmapping graphs that show growth in storage and CPU usage, for predicting when we need to purchase more. There's quite a lot of information there that we use to help with our job.

One thing I would really like for them to do is to correlate multiple machines together, multiple VMs, and get a bigger picture of CPU usage or memory usage. That's a real challenge in Prism Pro that we overcome utilizing Splunk. That might be something they could work on, but we found ways of utilizing the data that they provide already through REST or API calls and having access to it through a Splunk interface.

I've been wanting them to improve and mature their Prism interface. With our utilization of Splunk, I found that we tie those together pretty well. Having them revamp the entire product to try and make it better would be a real challenge.

I have been using Nutanix, in general, and subsequently Prism Pro, for the past three years.

By and large the stability of Prism Pro is very good. 

I do feel that we seem to run into a lot of problems with memory DIMMs within the Nutanix servers. Maybe they're overly cautious, but we do seem to get frequent failures for nodes that are removed for possible memory issues, or just the possibility that there could be a memory issue. If overly cautious is a downside, they're overly cautious. But if that means that our systems perform well and we don't get errors of data corruption, then it's all for the better. 

Their systems are very resilient and their uptime is very good, as they automatically live-migrate machines off to different nodes in the same cluster. They do that very well.

Having the cluster live outweighs having a single node fail, and that's the whole point of having multiple nodes. From that standpoint, the last time we had a system down because of the Nutanix was probably two years ago. And the cause was a network issue, which was something outside of their control. One cluster could not talk to another cluster and it went into a panic state and started shutting down VMs. It wasn't that Nutanix went offline. We had a network issue. They went into a protective mode to protect the data. That may be leaning towards the overly cautious, but we had zero corruption with any of our actual VMs. It did bring our application down, but everything was functional once we got the network issues worked out.

The scalability is fantastic. Anytime you need more hardware, you just throw it in and it consumes it and starts working with it. 

The only downside is the size of the clusters. As you start growing out towards 20 or more nodes, it becomes unwieldy and slows down the administrative processes. Users and administrators have to be aware that they have to scale out their clusters in addition to scaling out nodes when they have to increase capacity. That just goes along with understanding how the systems work and where their peak performance is at, and making sure that you build out correctly.

We have about 20 users of Prism Pro and they range from automation technicians to engineers to site reliability engineers, to those who actually administer the system. We have two staff for deployment and maintenance of Nutanix. Their roles are to maintain and upgrade and monitor the Nutanix infrastructure.

Our shop is 100 percent Nutanix. We do have some bare-metal servers that have functions for other applications, but all of our compute runs on Nutanix. So our use of it is rather extensive. We utilize it in all of our data centers exclusively.

Their support is second to none. Anytime you have an issue, they know what they're doing. They get the right people involved and your issues are taken care of in a very timely manner. Their support is fantastic. I hate giving people a 10 out of 10, because I think there's always room for improvement, but their support is really close to a 10. They're responsive and knowledgeable. And when they don't know the answer, they quickly get to someone who does.

Previously, we were running on Hyper-V from Microsoft. We found that it didn't suit our needs. We needed the compute, the storage, and everything under one roof, which Nutanix provides for us. Also, Nutanix's solution is more elegant than Hyper-V because you're able to bring multiple servers together into a cluster and maintain your VMs in a cluster of servers. That's as opposed to a single point of failure with one server or one array or the like.

I wasn't deeply involved with the initial setup, but I think that it was fairly simple. I do know that anytime we need to add more infrastructure, the integration with additional nodes or adding a new chassis is extremely simple and well laid-out. They excel at that.

We did work with an integrator and we had two sales engineers from Nutanix who assisted with that process. They were fantastic. Nutanix is a great team to work with.

I'm not privy to the numbers, but I think our ROI is quite high for Nutanix.

The contributing factor is, being able to have all of our infrastructure in one location. We use Nutanix not just for the software, the hypervisor, but for the entire solution. We're utilizing their chassis and their nodes. Having that all in one place, and being able to just add more hardware as we grow our infrastructure, is incredibly useful. It allows us to grow as we need and when we need. That alone allows us to dictate what drives our costs — when we need compute, how much compute we need — and allows us to stay ahead of our growing client base. 

In addition to that, their uptime allows us to have the performance and reliability that our customers demand.

It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs. If you're all-in with Nutanix, and you have a lot of nodes, it drives down the cost.

I know Hyper-V was a consideration. We may have also considered VMware.

Do your homework and make sure to get some engineers involved at Nutanix who can assist you. You'll run into issues that they can help steer you around. Nutanix is willing to help if you are willing to ask. The system is not without its complexities. It has a lot of features and there are a lot of things that you can do with it. If you engage the professionals at Nutanix, they can steer you in the right direction. You should utilize them.

Prism Pro can be quite complex, if you want it to be. At its heart there are a lot of features available. If you utilize it for simple purposes, then you can get simple answers. The ease of use really depends on what level of technicality you want to have with it. But in general, the interface is well laid-out. There's a little bit of a learning curve in making sure you're going to the right location and knowing what you're trying to locate. But otherwise, I feel that the interface is well laid-out and intuitive to use.

Some other things they've done recently, like having events tied back to documentation, which is something that they are working on right now, have been great.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you get what you pay for. Nutanix has been a great company to work with. As I said, their support is fantastic. If you're going to use someone for your critical business needs, make sure that it's a company that's going to stand behind you and help make your job better and easier.

We leverage virtualization most of all. Prior to this, we had 5 virtual hosts using 4 SANs and dedicated network resources. Our back up solution for this was also a bit clunky as we had to back everything up daily so we had a disaster recovery in the event that we lost a SAN due to hardware failure. Our hardware had aged us and was in need of replacing. Having 4 nodes in our cluster allows us to have replication and if 1 node fails that is no data loss but in an entire san fails that falls into disaster territory

Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus. 

Customizable Dashboard allows each admin to have things the way they like. Admins can just add the features they use most and remove the ones they don't. Alerts and tasks are easy to see and access.

Capacity Runway which shows us behavior trends. We can analyze trends from the past and predict future growth. It can also address potential capacity issues in the future based on past growth. This also includes the VM behavioral learning engine which allows us to plan for future growth at the single VM level. This is helpful in preventing over or under-provisioned VM's

I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging. Especially if you are migrating a busy SQL server to Nutanix. No matter how you convert this you will lose transactions done during the actual migration. This can also be a bit challenging when trying to upload the disk images after converting the disks P2V. Uploading is primarily done via a browser. Most browsers cannot upload files in the TB area. There are ways but nothing straight forward. This really needs to be addressed in the future. 

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for almost three years.

We used a different product but the annual was adding up and our equipment was due for replacement. Nutanix was a little expensive for the initial outlay but when added up over a few years in made financial sense.

The only advice I give people is to make sure you understand your support contract with your vender. If you buy direct from Nutanix then you deal direct with Nutanix support. If you buy from a vender such as Dell you must go through Dell support. Then Dell support contacts Nutanix support and it gets a bit messy in my opinion

We were a VMware environment and looked at HyperV.

We have two different clusters in the environment one is an all flash cluster of 40 nodes and other one is a hybrid cluster of 4 nodes and are on the way to introduce another all flash cluster of 9 nodes in the environment. All the clusters have VMs as well as file servers hosted in them. 

Managing multiple clusters with mix of VMs and file servers by logging into multiple console will lead to additional operations overhead and also can cause delay in incident resolution as operations team will have to login to particular management console and carry out the remediation activities. 

First of all, the product is very stable. We did not see any breakages happen due to product misbehavior.

Thanks to multiple automations and self-explanatory dashboards, the overall operations load on my team has come down considerably. On top of this, since we are utilizing the Files feature also from both of our clusters, it is easing out the management overhead in that layer as well. 

Though the console is highly sensitive about any small alerts, which makes the dashboard through many alerts even for one single issue with the server, network, or connectivity, it is always better to have alerts even for small things than having no alert at all. 

One more thing to notice is the strong customer support team that Nutanix has. In the initial days when we were not familiar with this technology, we had raised many support requests and they helped us with all of them with outputting them into non-an issue buckets which we have seen many large enterprises do.

Reporting features in the console is so self-explanatory that even a non-IT person in the office can also understand it. Our finance users have access to this console and they will get the consumption details without having any dependency on us. Also, this dashboard is extended to our NOC team who will be able to interpret the alerts and decide on what to inform us whenever an alert pops up.

Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure.

From an AHV point of view, I look for the feature of setting a limit for the memory allocation for individual VMs. This will help in providing higher memory to VMs for users who always ask or more and more memory but end us not using it causing other needy to be deprived of it. It will be better if they can extend this to non-AHV hypervisors and also non-Nutanix clusters so that people who need this feature but can not goto HCI currently can make use of this product. 

Also, I believe they should take a relook into their licensing model to adopt to the current situation.

We have been using this from last 1 year.

From my past 1 year experience I can say that the product is very stable.

I would recommend keeping the cluster to smaller number of members which will help in faster maintenance and upgradation activities.

We use VMware in 3 tier architecture deployments. This was the first HCI deployment in our department.

It took less than 2 days to setup the cluster of 40 nodes. So need not say anything separately about the ease of deployment.

We took Lenovo professional services team support for this deployment and they are good at it.

1 year is too short term to recover the ROI.

This will be a better fit in the age of hybrid cloud and with Nutanix adding more and more products in its offering, soon Nutanix will become a complete package to run IT. So it will be easy to scale and add modules as and when needed.

We evaluated Horizon, Cisco Hyperflex along with Nutanix.

Our organization is utilizing Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the majority of our infrastructure applications software, systems software, print processing software, and web application software as well as all of our core it infrastructure applicaitons and processes including alerting, monitoring, logging. Our only exceptions are currently our large data base implementations and our accounting edi batch processing solutions which are said to require ultra low latency and high performance network and storage.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter. Nutanix Prism Pro is powered by machine learning and task automation and it intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables our infrastructure team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence, recapturing valuable time we can utilize elsewhere within our organization. Traditional Infrastructure Team Operations Management tools were built for traditional static infrastructure. These tools often overwhelm infrastructure teams with overly obnoxious alerts. In dynamic and scalable modern data centers with high performance and diverse workloads, infrastructure teams need simplicity and accuracy to achieve high productivity. Prism Pro automagically mines large volumes of system data to generate actionable insights and enables our infrastructure team to automate remediation of everyday tasks for performance management and capacity optimization.

ONE-CLICK UPGRADES! - Nutanix Prism Pro provides robust upgrading Nutanix clusters mechanism that has long been a delightful experience delivered via one-click upgrades. The one-click process hides a lot of complexity by using advanced automation and consumer-grade design experience. Historically, each cluster had to be upgraded one at a time. While the process itself was simple, this constraint still extended the length of time required to complete upgrades for multi-cluster environments.

Advance Search- Nutanix prism Pro offers to search Nutanix infra related entities as a content format. For example, it shows for VMs who is using memory equal to or greater than 10GB,VM memory =< 10GB. This is a very advanced feature that helps to get deeper details of Nutanix cluster entities.

The Life Cycle Manager tracks software and firmware versions of all entities in the cluster, integrated both on Prism Element and Prism Central.
LCM consists of a framework and a set of modules for inventory and update.
LCM supports software updates for all platforms that use Nutanix software.
LCM supports firmware updates for specific platforms.
From Prism Element, you can use LCM to update AHV, NCC, Foundation, BIOS, BMC, DATA Drives, HBA Controllers, SATADOMs, and M.2 Drives (G6 and later). From Prism Central, you can update Calm, Epsilon, Karbon, and Objects. When you run a firmware upgrade on multiple nodes, the LCM updates one node at a time to prevent any downtime in your cluster. Before the upgrade starts, all the VMs on that node are migrated to another host and the node enters maintenance mode. Always make sure that your cluster can tolerate a node failure by having the data resiliency status as “OK” in Prism Element.

LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future.

We have been utilizing Nutanix for fifteen months.

We have found Nutanix solution to be very stable; we have never experienced any downtime with these solutions and aside from a few LCM hiccoughs we have never had any performance impacts utilizing this solution.

We have found Nutanix solution to be highly scalable; the Shared Nothing Distributed Architecture works well for our implementation.

Nutanix support has definitely been best in class there has been more than one occasion where we have contacted for support with an issue and tech/engineer has noted unrelated issues and insisted on resolving either during the session or at our earliest convenience.

Previously we utilized traditional hardware-software infrastructure solutions Nutanix is our first hyperconverged infrastructure solution.

I was not involved in the initial rollout of our first cluster sets but continued rollouts of new clusters has been straightforward.

Our implementation efforts have generally been a joint effort between vendor team and our in-house IT personnel the level of expertise has been quite good although there have been some communication breakdowns along the way.

Unfortunately I can not provide exact ROI calculations but we continue to invest in converting our traditional infrastructure to Nutanix HCI.

Unless your organizaiton is in a very limited niche don't pay the hypervisor tax it just isn't worth it.

I was not involved in the initial shortlisting of HCI vendor solutions.

Our organization has been pleased with the Nutanix HCI solution overall. The majority of our issues have been related to non-Nutanix hardware underlying the entire solutions so if We had it to do over again We would probably choose to go with Nutanix hardware.

We wanted to find a way to start getting our academics used to paying for compute without having to actually pay, but still to do it for real in the cloud. We use the self-service portal within Nutanix for them to deposit some funds, which is a cost charge, not a credit card, and then we say, "Okay, based on that, you have bought X amount of CPUs, Y amount of memory, and Z amount of storage." They can then go in and say, "Okay, well, I know I've got a pool of 10 BCPs for a month. I want to spin up three of them to process this data, which I'll then tear down afterwards."

We use it for our neurological psychology department where they do a lot of brain scans. They want to upload them to a place where they can compute the output of those scans and then they want to tear down their compute afterwards, because they don't need to be running all the time. 

Another area uses it for looking at weather data, which is typically quite a large amount of data. They only need to process once and then they can destroy it because they don't need to look at it again, once they've done analytics on it. 

Those are our typical use cases: to allow our research areas to spin up their resources against a pricing model that they've secured funding for, and not have to engage the IT teams to provide the resources for them. It also allows them not to go beyond their budgets and stay within predefined lanes.

We have it on-premise. We built our own private cloud and we host it on there for our academics to consume and spin up their own resources. We know that we could burst up to Azure, AWS, and GCP, but we don't. We keep it all within our private cloud at the moment.

It gives the end-users control of what they need. If they have requested a VM with two VCPUs but they actually need four, they have the ability to go in and do that themselves, from the same pool of resources that they've been allocated. It gives them the complete flexibility to do it themselves. If they're working remotely and they access the cluster from, say, Australia on the opposite side of the world from us, to use an extreme example, and they want to do stuff overnight, they don't have to wait for IT to wake up eight o'clock in the morning, or even later. They can do it at whatever time is relevant to them locally.

It's helped us in terms of ease of compliance and simplicity for the researchers in governing their research grants. The grants are usually very strict regarding how money can be spent, to make sure there's no waste allowed and to get the best value out of the grants. Rather than having to spend thousands on something they may only need for very small periods in a month or a year, it allows them to do more research than they could necessarily afford to do if they had to buy the hardware. It really gives them that agility. The capital that the researchers would have had to spend on hardware, to achieve this, is now all part of a central service using hardware that we've already procured.

In addition, because it does allow the end-users to look after their compute themselves, it means that they can work on things together. They don't have to put a request into IT for them to spin up the resource for them. They can dip in, spin it up, and use it straight away, so if they're actually working very closely with somebody, they don't have to wait for IT. That means the collaboration window is going to be a lot slicker. The actual activity can be done at the time it's needed, rather than having to plan way in advance or slow it down because they need some resource and they haven't got the ability to use it. The ultimate message is that they have the power in their hands, which means the collaboration becomes more fluid because they don't need to wait on IT to give them services.

Nutanix Calm's one-click self-service feature means that we don't have to look after it. The end-users can, as I said, serve themselves so they can set the blueprint and spin up some resources. They don't need to wait for IT, which means that we, in IT, can actually focus on adding value by making sure that the clusters are healthy and by looking to help them with some of their requirements. IT doesn't have to be the "organ grinder" and turn that key to keep giving them resources that they need. Because they have that basic control, we can provide them more value.

It allows the research to happen a lot faster, for the researchers to do the work that they need to do and then tear it down. It certainly does support a much faster turnaround time. Typically, in the past, we would allocate up to a week to provide them with a complete resource, depending on what the requirements were and if we had them available or not. With this, it allows them to do it themselves within a matter of minutes. The speed at which they can do research is now a lot greater.

The solution has enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of the organization, absolutely. That's the main incentive.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability for people to reserve some resources and then use them as and when they need them, rather than us having to give them those resources as they request them. It's very much aligned things to a cloud mindset before letting them loose with an actual credit card.

The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all. It wasn't overly easy back in the early days of Calm to use it. It was a bit "hacky" in terms of the way you had to build the blueprints, but now it's a lot easier to use. It's a very "light touch" IT solution for an IT service that we provide.

Even though it's a lot easier, it could be a bit slicker for the end-users. The ability to create their own blueprints could be without their having to understand the details of what they're trying to do. If they could just tick this, this, this, and this — whatever they need — and it would go spinning those up, that would be better. Now, we still guide them quite a bit.

I've been using Nutanix Calm for about two years now.

We haven't had any problems. In two years it's never gone down. Every time we patch it, it patches seamlessly. We've never had any problems with it and we've never had to do anything to try to resolve any problems.

Because it's all based at Nutanix, it's really easy to scale it out. We have increased our capacity on our platform a number of times, and it seamlessly rebalances the clusters as it needs to.

It's purely our researchers who are using it. We don't use it ourselves, as an IT department. We have capacity for 100 active VMs at any time and there are about 300 academics in the department who have access to use it.

We haven't used Nutanix technical support for this solution. We have used it for other products, but Calm looks after itself. We have not had any problems with it at all.

We didn't have a previous product. We would do it ourselves, which was part of the challenge for us because we couldn't deliver at the speed at which they wanted us to deliver. The researchers were going off and trying to do it themselves within public cloud, and therefore spending and wasting a lot of money which they could have spent in better ways.

We moved to Calm to make it more efficient for the academics. It would give them a bit more power and control, and ultimately we want to be a lot more cloud-orientated. To achieve that, there needs to be a degree of governance. If they are used to that governance in how they operate, then migrating them to a public cloud piece should be easier. They will  be used to being sensible with when their resources are turned on or not.

Everything is very straightforward to set up. It's as few clicks as possible, which works very nicely.

Our deployment was done within about a day. That was two years so it would be hard to put a more specific time on it. It was also a very different product then, as compared to now.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we essentially got the solution because we wanted to help some of the areas that were complaining about our speed of delivery. We only really offered it to those areas. But we've now gone full circle and just committed to some more Calm licenses to grow our capability because of the speed of delivery it gives to our researchers. That's especially true with their being remote. They can then do it all themselves and don't have to engage with IT to help them spin things up. In the past, they just knocked on the door and got some support from the computing team. With people working remotely now, that's obviously a lot harder. It allows us to achieve remote work.

As for maintenance, It's part of the wider stack. When there's an update, we will roll that out. But it's all pretty much one click and away you go. You come back a little bit later and it's done.

We did it ourselves, based on the guidance that they provided to us.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It doesn't cost us very much and it makes our academic flows a lot easier and we don't get complaints anymore about not being responsive to their needs.

I can't really comment on pricing because, being in the public sector, we get different pricing to what is out there in the world.

But in terms of approach, size it on what your minimum would need to be and then add additional licensing as you need it, rather than trying to go too big, too quickly. The whole point of Nutanix software is that you can grow and size the estate, rather than going instantly to a monolithic solution from day one.

We didn't look at other solutions. We already had Nutanix to provide some research compute for other things, so we went with Calm in addition to the suite that we had at the time.

The biggest lesson I've learned using this solution is how easy it is to empower users to achieve what they need to achieve. Without this, it would be very hard to build the trust up and allow our academics to do what they need to do.

In our case, Calm doesn't help us to implement standardization across our organization because the research is usually quite specific. The types of VMs that they would spin up would all be slightly different. Some might have much bigger storage requirements, some might have higher RAM requirements, and some might need to be quite low compute but for longer periods. It does tend to vary quite a lot. But on the flip side, it allows them to all work the same way so they're not going off and burning money in public cloud environments.

When we first got it, it probably would have been a five out of 10 because it wasn't the easiest to build the initial blueprints. Now, we're certainly up to an eight. There's always room for improvement with something like this.

Prism Pro lets us manage multiple Nutanix Clusters through a single interface. I can view all the alerts or health of each Cluster from one website instead of going to each one individually. 

When I started with the company, we did not have Nutanix. Within the first six months, we installed Nutanix software and Prism Pro. In the very beginning of the first six months, I was working a lot of overtime, having to fix a lot of things. I don't have a lot of overtime anymore. I don't have the nights and weekends that I used to because of all the time savings the solution has given me.

We use the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions. This shows us what our capacity is, where it's going, and what trend it has been on. Thus, we can decide whether we need to purchase it next year.

The Pro license gives us Capacity Behavior Analytics. This feature lets you see what your capacity is and what you're using in your Cluster. It predicts what it's going to look like in a few months. You can forecast if you need more infrastructure. It sees how much your environment's growing and helps with the sizing of VMs to meet your workload growth.

The 1-Click Centralized Upgrades are really nice. When you go in and want to upgrade your Cluster, you just click a button and everything will upgrade. You don't have to go to each individual server to do the upgrades.

These features save time. They give us insight into what our data is doing and what we need to do to ensure it's running properly.

It is very intuitive and easy to use. It just makes sense. You don't have to look around for a lot of things. The things that you will be using are just there. Everything is on one screen. You can click through to go where you want to go, but there are not a million buttons that you have to figure out (where to go for what).

We use the solution’s X-Play automation feature. The anomaly detection is nice, as it give us insight into things that are anomalies. We can then take corrective actions on them. Its codeless approach to automation is good because I don't like to code. It's point and click, which is nice. It sets up your automation without having to do any coding. 

X-Play has a page that provide us with a single tool for monitoring automation. This page is where I go if I need to set up automation or check if something needs to be done.

Pricing could be worked on a bit. I feel that when I talk to people about it who have looked into Nutanix, they say, "Well, it's pretty expensive compared to the other thing I was looking at." I tell them it's worth it. 

I would also recommend getting the word out. I still talk to a lot of people about the solution in the industry. They are not aware of it, and say, "What is that?"

About five years.

The stability is great. I haven't had it go down on me, so I haven't really had any issues with Prism Pro. We've had some hardware issues, but the way that Nutanix has their software setup, it doesn't have downtime to the end user and the VMs don't go down. Everything just keeps working.

I do the deployment and maintenance for this solution.

We have been adding a server per year. We have gotten to the point where we will be taking out a server and adding a server, so we're in the sweet spot right now. It's been great. It's not like other solutions where you buy it all upfront, then by the time you need more, you have to replace the whole thing. With this solution, I can easily just add some capacity or CPU by adding another node.

We have 150 VMs across four Clusters with 18 nodes. We are utilizing the solution at 100 percent. 

We are not a huge company so we probably have two users: a system administrator (me) and my networking guy. The help desk doesn't even need to get in it, so they don't use it.

It is the best support that I have ever dealt with. They're knowledgeable and have always been great, easy, and accommodating to work with, e.g., in the first couple of months of deploying Nutanix, we had an issue with certain nodes that were rebooting automatically. Nothing went down, but it was concerning. Within a week of having the problem, we had a dedicated support person who worked with us for about a month and a half while they found the bug and developed a new patch for it. We tested it for them, then once it was working, everything was good. About a month later, the head of the support team down in North Carolina came out to visit us just to make sure everything was okay. 

We had IBM and Dell EMC storage before, but both of them have their own interfaces, so there were two or three things that I had to look at. With this solution, since we have Nutanix, it's just one. That makes it a lot easier.

At my previous job, I used Cisco UCS and NetApp storage.

The initial setup was very easy. You just click a button, and it will set up your Prism Pro VM that runs. Installing the Nutanix platform from the beginning was amazingly easy. At my old job, we just installed new hardware, and that took about a month. Nutanix took four hours, so it was a huge difference.

We talked the implementation over with the vendor when we were ordering. A couple guys came onsite to help us. It was very simple. The Nutanix guys were great. Any little problem that we would run into was fixed in a minute, then we just rolled through it. That's why the implementation was so quick. 

We have seen ROI with Nutanix. We have more reliability than what we had before. We used to have outages all the time where I would be working overtime, and that costs money.

Some people say that Nutanix is a bit more expensive. However, when we were looking at Nutanix versus Cisco and NetApp before deploying this solution, the prices were very similar. Being a government entity, we got a bit more of a discount on Nutanix so it was a bit cheaper. The time savings after the fact has been really worth it.

Prism Pro is a license that we have on all of our products for Nutanix. It gives us a bunch of different new features.

Prism Pro is a bit more upfront. It costs a bit more for some of the features that you get. We have four Clusters, and two of them don't have Prism Pro because they weren't even available with what we bought. Those two Clusters also run well, but they don't have all the features.

When I started, we were looking at Nutanix, but also at NetApp and Cisco, which is what I had just come from and done a new installation. I was pushing for that. However, when I saw the presentation from Nutanix, I was like, "Well, this is how it just should work. Let's give it a try." It's not easy running the whole thing by myself in a normal situation, but with Nutanix, it lets me do that because I don't have to worry about all the little bits and pieces. It's just one interface which is easy to manage.

From my previous experience, I worked with Cisco and NetApp, where Cisco was the servers and NetApp was the storage. I transitioned into just doing storage and did storage all day, every day at my old job. I moved things around trying to make space for this, that, or someone wanting to put something where we didn't have space. I would have to move all types of stuff. It was a big pain. When I came to my new job, and we started Nutanix, you don't have to do any of that. There isn't anything I almost ever do with storage unless I'm adding a new node. It's all shared in one giant pool of storage. This saves so much time. It's like, "Why was the other company doing it that way?" It doesn't make any sense and was a pain.

You have to at least look at this solution. Once you do, you will buy it. All my old colleagues that have moved onto different jobs too, and I always tell them about it.

They are always expanding what they have and what they are offering.

It can do a bunch of other things that we don't use yet, but are thinking about.

Biggest lesson learnt: IT doesn't have to be super complicated.

I would rate Prism Pro as a 10 (out of 10).

It is to manage all my clusters. I have nine nodes, splitting six nodes on one side and three nodes on the another side. Prism Pro is the center to manage the whole cluster.

We have a nine node clusters. All machines are NXs from Nutanix. Our environment runs new development tools, like GitLab. DevOps are running inside of Nutanix and a few other systems. We are using Nutanix for new stuff to implement and test new technologies, such as DevOps, Kubernetes, Dockers, and Hadoop (in a few of the clusters for big data).

I am using the latest version.

Prism Pro can do everything that I need to manage my machines. I can manage my storage, priorities, and higher operations.

• The update for all clusters
• The Kubernetes solution for Nutanix
• Calm is a good tool for deploying critical blueprints. 

All these tools are managed by Prism Pro. With Prism Pro, you have the scripting tool where all functions are available through the interface and 1-click centralized upgrades. Though, you can do the same things by programming.

The tool's management for clusters is amazing and simple. It's quite simple to use it daily. With 1-click centralized upgrades, I can update my entire cluster using the data tech software from a single point in an easy way. It shows me that I have an update, then I just apply it, wait a few minutes, and all of the clusters are updated. It doesn't matter if it's a software update or something like bills. Everything is done from one central point. Also, the dashboard are really good. We have some relevant formations where I can see my cluster's CPU age, memory age, virtual machines, etc. All information can be viewed in an easy way, which provides me a cloud-like experience on an on-prem solution.

The dashboards also let me see the efficiency of my virtual machines, e.g., I can set it for a reminder to show me if there are any machines that are overprovisioned or constrained, then I can adjust the machines. In addition, I can create new virtual machines on any clusters from a single point of access. It's a pretty cool tool.

The interface is nice and simple. When the guys did the implementation, they told me, "They will walk me through on the solution and explain most of the important configuration tools." After that, I learned Prism Pro by myself. I never did a training or anything else. When the techs provide a new update, I take a look and see what's new. Sometimes I watch YouTube video from Nutanix with the new features, but it is really simple.

For now, my biggest problem in our corporation is the Nutanix hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things. We are only allowed to use VMware, but I use AOS. I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions. I know that they're including Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tools. I think that Era should include everything on a single tool where you can manage everything you need inside your organization.

It could maybe have better documentation. Nutanix does have really good documentation, but it could have more details in the future. 

Since 2018.

It's really stable. In two years, I never have had a problem with Prism Pro.

I do the maintenance.

It can grow with my environment. With Prism Pro, it manages your entire Nutanix cluster. If I add more clusters onto that, I can manage it from the Prism Center, I just need to redistribute the cluster, then I can manage it like it's one machine. It doesn't matter if I have two or 100 clusters, I can manage it from a single point, which is good. This saves me time because if I need to update (for example), I can update a lot of machines from 1-click. Then, it will go on each machine of the clusters and update them. I am saving at least 40 percent of my time managing multiple clusters from a single point.

I am using the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions but I already sp;have good capacity inside of my cluster. I think if I create new machines, it is really good but I am not using it so much. I have enough capacity at the moment. For the tools on Prism, I'm not planning to create so many machines. However, I already do use the tool and the predictions are really amazing. It is really helpful for planning in advance (e.g., six months, one year, or two years) the capacity for the cluster. I can estimate what will be the capacity of my cluster. For example, if I am a planning for one year to create 20 machines with a specific size, the machine learning algorithms can show me if I have enough capacity on the cluster to do that or if I need to expand the cluster. 

Between my colleagues from the operations team and me, there are around six people using it. I'm the owner of the contract for this company as the infrastructure architect. The other five guys are Linux and Windows administrators.

The support quality for Nutanix is unbelievable. The normal way support works from some other vendors: If I open a web ticket, then I need to wait three to four hours for a first contact from the company. Normally, this contact will ask me, "What is my problem," and try to direct me to the right person, then need to wait more. A few times, an engineer talked with me and acted on the solution. However, with Nutanix, I open a ticket, and in five minutes, I am talking with an engineer who can solve my problem. 

It is a really good experience to call Nutanix support via the phone. E.g., I explained a problem that I was having, and they told me, "I don't know so much about this problem, but my colleague at my side does know it. Just a minute." They transferred the call to the guy, whom I talked to and he help me. When they are going to end the call, they only ask for my serial number of my cluster to open a ticket. This is just to register the case. Before this, I had never seen a company where you call, get the support, and after that, they create a ticket for you. Normally, with companies, you need to call to a call center who registers the calls, then sends them to the engineer. When you call to Nutanix, you talk with the engineer.

We are still using VMware vCenter for virtualization management. Unfortunately, many systems are managed by my colleagues from Germany, and we're located in Brazil. 

We brought on Nutanix because we were looking to improve our environment and boost its speed. We were also looking for a new solution/tool. We trust Nutanix, and especially like the cloud-like solution for on-prem. We have been happy with them.

It was really simple for me. When I purchased the hardware, I also asked for an implementation. I followed the implementation with the guys. It was one to two days. When we deployed the machines we needed to do some updates, after that the configuration was quite simple and fast.

For deployment, we needed to install the hardware, do the start up, connect all the cables, and build the network, then install the Prism Pro and all the software. This took two days for us to unpack and put in the rack.

Our implementation strategy was to install the rack and configure the system, then when it was up and running, deploy the machines. It all worked and was really amazing. 

Two guys from the vendor did the installation. I used a third-party integrator, Servex (a Brazilian reseller/partner of Nutanix), to implement Prism Pro for me because because they have some configurations hided in Nutanix. They configure every piece of the driver, etc. I preferred that a third-party company do the implementation for me and I just follow up on all the activities.

Our experience with Servex was really good. Those guys really know the product and tools. The implementation went well.

We needed to install the hardware in two data centers. We installed in one location, then went to another location for install. However, this was a fast implementation.

I haven't fully recovered my investment.

If you compare a three layer solution, server, cell network, and storage to Nutanix, the prices are quite similar. However, if you take a look at the whole environment including the management, Nutanix has a better cost when compared with other solutions, especially because it's hardware. 

Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good.

When I purchased the cluster, I could use the Nutanix hardware or purchase Dell EMC hardware using Nutanix software. However, when I purchased Dell EMC hardware in the past, if I needed some support, first I would need to call to Dell EMC and they would need to see if it's a hardware or software problem. If it's a software, then the issue is for Nutanix to resolve. This is the reason that when I purchased the solution, I purchased the hardware from Nutanix. I wanted to have the full support experience from Nutanix. I have been really happy with them.

I did a small evaluation of HPE SimpliVity and Dell EMC VxBlock, but I did not like these two tools. I preferred Nutanix because the scalability is better than the other two solution. It also has a better hardware solution that is simpler to use.

While I know that VMware has some hyperconversion tools like Nutanix, the problem is the licensing cost for VMware. For a hyperconversion system, Nutanix has a better solution than VMware, especially if you take a look at the costs.

I only use the Calm automation feature where I can create machines, but only inside my clusters. Its codeless approach to automation is amazing and good. It does some automated tasks on drag and drops. It also provides you the power to adjust scripts and the code so you can do more than the basics. Specifically in Calm, admins can confidently set up automation rules. In the Prism Pro, we have the CLI tool where you can deploy a machine and administration cluster over command line. Basically, you can create your automations on your own without using a DB. This provides us with a single tool for monitoring automation.

I would rate this solution as a 10 (out of 10). I really love this solution. It is excellent.