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.

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.

We're using it for monitoring and managing all of the NetApp storage in our environment, both in the cloud and on-prem. We are expanding it to use it with our virtualized environment and with our in-house storage environments.

It's allowed us to tag storage with applications and business units, so that when we have a requirement to migrate data for an application, we can quickly identify all of the storage that the application utilizes.

The solution also provides a single tool for cloud-based architecture, such as microservices and containers, as well as on-premise infrastructure. We're not fully utilizing that part of it yet, but we're in the process of starting down that road. It's provided us with the ability to better manage the storage and to report on it to management. We're able to show them, via dashboards and reports, how the storage is being utilized and what the return on investment is.

And when it comes to the solution's ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of our environment, it's very powerful. Because it's SaaS, a lot of the upfront work is being done for us. We're spending less time managing the application and more time getting the data we need out of it.

NetApp Cloud Insights advanced analytics for pinpointing problem areas are outstanding. When we have a performance issue for a specific piece of storage, a volume, or an application we can graphically show the business units, the application owners, how the storage is performing relative to the performance that they're seeing on their clients or on their servers. It helps us to pinpoint where issues may be, whether they are with storage, the network, on the clients, or with the application itself.

The advanced analytics have also enabled us to look at trending and detect

• where issues are
• where we would have to do load balancing to keep performance from being degraded
• where we are running out of space in a given data center or storage node.

The advanced analytics help to reduce the time it takes to find performance issues as well because we run reports that look at trending. We can see where performance issues have not yet occurred, but that if we keep going in the direction we're going, we will have performance issues. That way we can proactively take action to ensure that we don't have any problems. We mitigate them before they happen. It's hard to quantify how much time it saves us, because it's very easy to see the problems before they occur, as opposed to dealing with them once they have occurred. It saves the businesses from having issues and keeps the entire environment running more smoothly.

In addition, the solution helped us to right-size workloads. It has shown us where we have issues, where storage growth has exceeded what is manageable. We've then worked with the business units and the application owners to break the data up into more manageable sizes, so that not only do they continue to get the performance that they need, but we're able to manage the storage without being backed into any corners that we can't get out of. Keeping the data broken into smaller pieces allows us to move it around to ensure that they get the performance they need. We're also able to ensure that the applications that require the highest level of performance get it. And those that don't have those high requirements can be put on lower power, with throughput storage that meets their needs, but without consuming horsepower on the fastest storage where they don't need it. Overall, it provides us with better utilization of the infrastructure.

The right-sizing has also reduced costs because we can more intuitively allocate resources and spend money on upgrades only where they're needed. Instead of just throwing more hardware at an environment, we can do it very selectively, based on the needs of the environment, needs that we are able to analyze through the reports that Cloud Insights provides to us. If I had to make an educated guess, it has reduced our costs by 20 to 25 percent.

Among the most valuable features are the queries and reporting that allow us to look at the utilization of resources, at how well the storage is performing, and to report on which resources are being used by which business units. We can track usage across the entire environment, across applications, business units, cost centers, etc.

There is room for improving the creating and managing or modifying of reports. That is still a difficult task to do and requires knowledge beyond the storage itself. I would love to see reporting improved so that we can create reports by dragging and dropping pieces into a report form and publish a report that way. We do get by with it, but typically it requires engagement with NetApp to get us the reports that we need.

We have been using Netapp Cloud Insights for about six months.

It's been very stable and very available. I'm not aware of any times that we've encountered an outage where the tools were unavailable to us.

It scales very well. As we've added new parts to the environment, it has been simple to add them to the Cloud Insights environment.

The number of people in our  company who directly utilize it would be about 100. People who benefit from the product and what it produces would be in the thousands; for example, finance. We generate reports automatically in Cloud Insights to show the utilization of all of the storage infrastructure, broken down by the amount of storage that is being utilized by individual applications or individual businesses. All of that is fed into the finance department so that they can track where resources are utilized and who is using them.

Their support has been outstanding. They're very responsive when we raise issues. When we request new reports and modifications to existing reports, they're always right there and ready to assist.

Prior to using Cloud Insights, we were using OCI, OnCommand Insight, which is the equivalent of Cloud Insights that we ran on our own hardware within our data center. We switched because it's going to provide us with a better ability to manage and monitor cloud-based data, while at the same time allowing us to do everything else that OCI used to do for us.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. It was not that difficult because NetApp worked with us throughout the deployment. Since we already had OCI on-prem, migrating just involved taking that OCI environment and recreating it in Cloud Insights. It was not difficult at all. We planned that all out with NetApp and they guided us through it. In fact, they did a lot of the work for us.

Our overall experience with NetApp support during the deployment was very positive. We didn't have any issues that weren't quickly resolved.

The deployment took about 30 days.

Our team has six people, all of whom are storage engineers, but none of us is dedicated, full-time, to administering or managing Cloud Insights. We're more users than maintainers, because it doesn't require much maintenance.

It's hard to quantify ROI, but it is definitely worth the investment. What it provides to us has extreme value, helping us to get the full utilization out of our investment in storage. Cloud Insights has helped us to optimize spend by removing inefficiencies and identifying abandoned resources on-prem. Eventually we will be getting there with our cloud infrastructure as well.

We've used it to find storage that is no longer being used by any clients; storage that had been orphaned. We have been able to work with the business centers to determine if the data can be deleted, or should be archived, or moved to less expensive storage if they need to keep it online.

The optimization hasn't reduced our cloud costs yet, but it will eventually, as we move deeper into the cloud. Right now, the lion's share of our data is still on-prem, but we are starting more migrations into the cloud. Cloud Insights will be integral to being able to manage that space and the amount that that space costs us.

We were using OCI, which was the predecessor to Cloud Insights. We've also utilized other monitoring and reporting tools, such as Nagios and Splunk. But Cloud Insights gives us a level of information we can't get from the other tools. It's far more powerful.

My advice would be to take a look at it, do a PoC, and see all the value that it can add, and all the power that it provides.

We rely on it to manage the storage, to look at trending, and determine where we're going to have problems. We can deal with things before they become problems. That's probably the most powerful thing that we get out of it. I don't think a day goes by that we don't utilize it.

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.