NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The ability to get reports out, to see what OCI is doing for us, and we can see what our capacity is. We can also see performance reports.

So capacity and performance are two of the big things we use it for.

We're in the telecommunications industry and we're an actual service provider as well. I work in the service providing part . We have all of these external customers that have their pay-for-storage on our storage arrays. We're able to see through annotation how much each of those customers is using and we can use it for billing purposes.

It's given us a better concept of what we've got out there and where our hurt points are, where we need some more work in the different areas, where we might need to move volumes around to get better performance, and also definitely to see where that capacity is, see if we need to add more storage.

We would like to see the ability to produce more complex reports without having to go to Professional Services.

About two years.

Very stable.

Very scalable. We've recently just got the two servers for data warehouse and collection and we've haven't even hit capacity on them yet.

We've used it extensively. They're awesome, very good.

Fairly straightforward, but after that, it's very complex to use and to learn and understand.

• Performance monitoring
• Monitoring events happening within the cluster
• Notifications we're receiving, mainly for monitoring

We can see the real-time status of the systems and, of course, monitoring. We have visibility in general.

There was a minor issue where we were receiving a notification that a cluster was not available, or communication to the cluster. OnCommand Manager could not reach a cluster, which is really much like a false positive. The minor issues were communications within the systems.

We have used the product less than a year; we installed probably six months ago.

It's a stable solution. Sometimes we receive a small number of false-positive alerts, but in general we can monitor the system efficiently.

Very scalable.

I have opened a few cases with NetApp support and, of course, I received valuable information. I was able to get through to the right person.

This is part of a migration, of migrating storage from EMC to NetApp. Once we migrated some data to NetApp storage we deployed OnCommand, the application as well, at the same time.

I was not involved in the initial setup of this product specifically, but now I'm involved in migrating from our current version to the new release that is available, which will help us to resolve the issues we've experienced.

We are in the real estate industry. We are using NetApp storage to store various types of data: flat files, file servers, we have host of Microsoft Sequel Server databases, Oracle databases, so we're using a wide range of data to store.

Some of the most valuable ones are actually being able to pull statistics off of the devices within our enterprise and correlate them to predict trends which are happening. 

Biggest benefits are with analytics on devices and some of the applications. Case in point, Exchange and SQL, seeing how they are doing with trending, then as we are adding things, see how it is changing that trend.

In the government and military industries specifically, it is unique. It has helped a lot. It is a little misunderstood still, but what we are getting out of it and what we are providing to the leadership has been extremely valuable to them. 

We can't encompass everything into it yet. E.g., the plugins for the other vendors' products that we can't currently monitor.

I have been using it for just over a year now.

I came into it after it was already in place. However, it was being underutilized, so we started bringing in a few of the OCI experts to spin us up to speed on what it is capable of and how we could use it.

It is extremely stable. 

For scalability, out of a 10, I would give it a nine. Mainly, this is because we have some other vendors' solutions, like Nutanix, where we do not have the plugins for them yet.

The data analytics for helping track down issues.

It's quicker to fix issues.

They're moving away from the Java interface, but there are still some things that are only in the Java versus the web interface.

About three years.

It's a stable product. No issues.

I think there are issues with the Java Stack. Java seems to use a lot more memory than other solutions.

I haven't used it.

We're a water and electric company. I wouldn't say the product is uniquely valuable to our industry, but it is valuable.

It's moving in the right direction. I think there are some things that it still hasn't quite got but it's a very good product.

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

Everything for it is just amazing.

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

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

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

About a year.

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

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

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

We were taking over from a previous company.

Performance data.

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

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

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

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

A little over a year.

The stability is very good.

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

It is very good.

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

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

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

The Performance Manager: Where we get performance statistics.

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

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

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

Eight years.

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

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

They do have good support.

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

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

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

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

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

It gives visibility to the VMs.

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

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

Three years.

The stability is terrible. It breaks all the time.

The scalability is fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than two years.

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

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

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

No.

It was very easy. No problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About seven years.

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

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

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

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

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