NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

This is a very good tool to see everything on an overview: Where and what are the devices, how much storage you are using, how much Apple storage, and with what connectivity is being used.

You will get a total view of your storage.

Because we can use it financially, we use it for inventory purpose. You can use it, not only for reporting, but you can identify connectivity and storage issues. You can pull performance reports.

We are a consulting company and we use it for various purposes.

• Email notifications
• Data store recoveries
• Moving into the cloud.

They should include more of these type of things.

We have used this solution for the last six years.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is nice, for all scales.

We use the tech support. They are good.

We are able to get through, and they will follow up for anything they are not able to give us the solution to immediately. They will work with internally among themselves, then they will get back to us.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, except for a firewall issue.

• The tracking of utilization of our storage systems.
• Seeing the throughput.

These are the most important metrics for having a working operating system and working storage system.

It's centralized. It's got a lot of data in there. We can utilize the data that's in there and the output to other systems to run scripts off of it. Therefore, it's pretty versatile.

Any increase in loading times, or anything like that, would be useful for us. It's slow, the user interface could be improved a little bit. You have to click through a lot of things in order to be able to find what you want. Also, the dashboards aren't very user-friendly.

We've had Insight for two years.

We haven't had any issues yet.

Very scalable, as long as you have the licenses. You just have to buy more licenses for more storage. As long as you have the money, you can support it.

We don't really use technical support for Insight. We haven't needed it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It already uses restful API, so it's on top of things.

What I get out of it: the day-to-day monitoring. In my role as an administrator, I'm primarily responsible for operational functionality, so I mostly use it to keep an eye on the system and make sure that we're meeting our SLAs and we're up and running.

Since we have to monitor multiple systems, it gives us a single pane of glass to look at all of our environments. Also, to compare and contrast, if one environment is having some issues, we can judge it against the other environments to make sure everything is on par with one another.

In the financial services industry, customer responsiveness is very important. Financial advisors cannot sit in front of a customer and say, "I can't get your data." Thus, being up and running and constantly available is a very important area for our client.

Alerting: It's not complicated, but with so many groups involved in setting up something like an SNMP trap, or even an email alerting system, so many different groups have to get involved. If there was a simpler way to do that, to bypass a lot of that bureaucracy, that would be helpful. Then, just to make it even easier for management to have their own dashboards, possibly customize it.

I've been using this solution in my current position in the financial services industry for about seven months.

It's been very stable. The entire NetApp environment has been extremely stable. We really don't have issues across the board with uptime.

We actually have a relatively low footprint, so we haven't scaled it up very much. Though I know we're not even close to pushing the boundaries of what we could do with it.

I have not specifically used tech support.

We chose NetApp because we look for a vendor who can provide value-added support, not just break and fix, but best practices, advice, roadmap information, information about other case studies from other customers in similar situations, and the ability to really help us (not just install the product), but to use the product and extract the maximum value out of it. Also, they really know our environment.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We also have not upgraded yet.

I would not have been privy to that. When those decisions were made, it was before I started.

If you're going to do any reasonable-sized NetApp installation, you need to have it. You just can't manage it effectively without that level of support. You can try to roll it out your own, or you can bring in a third party, and there are some good third parties out there, but if you really just want to get something up and running and you want to be able to manage it, it's the fastest way to get it going.

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.

• 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.

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 ease of use, because we don't have much time to learn all the new things.

The things we're able to derive, we're able to use that and figure out what the next steps would be that bring value to the company, or our organization. We get strategic insights and plan ahead.

Perhaps integration with other platforms; any other monitoring, other kinds of storage platforms.

It's OK so far. I don't think we push it to the limit of what it can do, so I think it's been pretty stable for us. It's been pretty good so far.

We haven't really found time to upgrade it, so we've been pretty happy with where we're at. I forget what version we're at. But so far it's been OK.

Like I said, we don't push it too much. We're using it for a few things and that's pretty much it.

We don't look at it from that perspective. We don't have a lot of devices that we monitor. So we don't need it from that perspective.

I think one colleague has used it once, maybe twice, that's it. I, personally, have not.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criterion for us is how easy is it to work with them. Our group is very small. We really don't have time to do a lot of back and forth with the vendors. It's either they want to deal with us or they don't, period. If they want work with us, we go ahead. If not, then we move on.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, again, we're not pushing it as much as we probably could and should. I think if we got down to knowing the nitty-gritty of it, we'd probably like it a lot more. But like I said, we just don't have time to use it that much.

If I were to advise a colleague at a different company who is looking at OCI and other similar solutions, I would say know the functions or features you want to use. Outside of that, do what we did not do, really try to get to know the product and do a deep dive into it.

• 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.