NetApp Cloud Insights Reviews

Our organization manages cloud platforms for our customers. We use the solution to deploy our CMP platform on the cloud.

The solution is easy to deploy.

In our area, many customers cannot afford the solution. The solution’s price is an issue.

I have been using this solution for one year.

The solution is stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The support is not very quick.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy. I would rate the initial setup a ten out of ten.

The deployment took seven months. We needed three people to deploy the solution.

The solution is expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

GCP is our cloud provider. Our clients are small enterprises. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The first use case for NetApp Cloud Insights is to monitor clients' infrastructure, excluding their networking equipment, such as IP-based network switches. NetApp Cloud Insights allows clients to monitor their solution from the application down to the storage layer, without drilling down to specific issues such as heat maps, bottlenecks, or spikes in IOPS. This functionality is not limited to NetApp storage or products; it also supports other vendors' products, including HPE, IBM, Dell, and Hitachi, as well as various server vendors and solutions such as Nutanix, VMware, and applications like Oracle, SQL, Microsoft, Linux, and Kubernetes.

The second use case involves end-to-end cyber resilience, starting from the storage layer, where it provides intelligence to interconnect with the on-tap feature. This ensures that any anomaly within a ransomware attack can be detected, reported, and action is taken, such as creating a snapshot. This allows the system or site administrator to recover from a ransomware attack if needed. Additionally, the system can perform cost calculations for multiple business units based on storage capacities, such as calculating the cost of storage per TB or GB. Capacity planning can also be done to determine how long the resources will last before running out. 

The solution can be deployed across public, private, and hybrid cloud services and we use AWS, Azure, and Google.

The ease of installation is good.

The IP-based monitoring could be added in a future release.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is 98 percent stable.

The solution is 98 percent scalable.

NetApp Cloud Insight can be used for any size organization.

The technical support is quick to resolve our issues.

Positive

The initial setup process is simple and can be done through self-service. We only require credentials for the necessary equipment, and then we can set up the research, generate reports, and customize them as needed. The best part is that no special training is required.

The amount of time required for deployment is dependent on the quantity of equipment that requires monitoring, therefore, it may take a few seconds or up to several minutes.

NetApp Cloud Insights is affordable compared to some of the perpetual cloud-based solutions that are out there. There is a standard premium license so depending on the features that we want, we can get a good price.

I give the price a nine out of ten.

We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

The data retention is only for a one-year period of time. For longer retention, the customer must download and store the data somewhere.

NetApp Cloud Insights is an excellent product that can be used regardless of whether we are using NetApp, HP, Dell, or Nutanix. One of the great things about this product is that there is a freeware license available for customers who manage up to 500 gigabytes. However, this license has limited features and does not include reporting.

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

It's a SaaS solution hosted by NetApp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We didn't have anything like this before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work with NetApp to get the best support possible.

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

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

It is for long-term tracking of performance information. I am also looking at the interaction between NetApp systems and non-NetApp systems.

It's only really being used for the storage, and to a limited extent, our VMware.

It is maybe being used once or twice a day at most. We're not using it actively. We are just using it in kind of a testing phase.

It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue.

The solution’s ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of our environment is good. However, I am making limited use of this.

I use Cloud Secure quite a lot. It's useful to track down what has happened in cases where users' files have gone missing, or they have lost them.

There are some very specific things for improvement in the Cloud Secure product. I have already given this feedback to the product managers regarding this area. 

Probably about a year.

The stability is reasonable, but there is some room for improvement.

It is very scalable. You can deploy an agent on different sites and places, if you want to.

I am probably the only person in the company who is using it. We're not really using the solution an awful lot, so it is not making a lot of difference at the moment to us. Later on, it might with a larger buy-in and involvement of different job functions. 

When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions.

We have other solutions that do kind of the things vaguely in this area. However, they don't cover everything in the way that Cloud Insights does.

I found the initial setup pretty straightforward. As long as you follow the instructions, you can get it initially up and running. 

The deployment took a day or two at most.

NetApp will tend to normally work with users to get it up and running rather than just leave you to your own devices. They were actually surprised that I got it up and running without using their help. The expectation is normally you would use their support for the setup. However, I did the initial implementation without any external support. So, it is relatively easy to set up, if you have a storage NetApp IT background.

The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model.

We were using the free tier, then they gave us some licenses for the full product, which last for six-months into a 12-month period. At this point, we are not paying for the product.

It was on the free tier. We were just testing to see what was in there, since there wasn't a cost. It was only to have a look.

We are not evaluating other solutions.

It is worth a small amount of effort to activate at the free tier: To see whether there is anything there which might help your business. Then, if you feel there will be stuff there, then maybe you can look at getting some licensing for the non-NetApp side of it.

I would rate this product as a seven out of 10.

I mainly use Cloud Insights for visualization and automation.

Cloud Insights' best features are visibility and the connector to move the workloads.

The first level of NetApp's technical support could be improved.

I've been using Cloud Insights since December last year.

The first level of NetApp's technical support is somewhat hit-and-miss.

I would rate Cloud Insights eight out of ten.