NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The analytics over it. The ability to connect to any type of storage device that I've got, then extract and report in a centralized manner on all my SAN infrastructure.

It's a centralized structure that has the ability to connect to any storage platform, it doesn't matter if it's NetApp or not, and be able to report consistently on all my fabric. It's the greatest advantage that I've have.

I would like them to change the licensing model. It costs too much.

It goes on raw instead of going on usable storage. It doesn't necessarily have a value when you deploy, for example, a 400TB storage and I'm only using 60GB out of it at the beginning. Then, I have to pay for the entire 400TB, which is very costly, instead of having a growing up session.

It's very stable.

Scalability is fairly reasonable.

We just increased the number of agents that we have, so we didn't have any issues in deploying it. NetApp has been there with us since Day One to do the analysis and to iron out a plan for deployment. No issues there. That's very standard.

We go directly to our account manager, who we feel is knowledgeable and responsive, and put in the requirements there.

We use it to identify cold storage, hot storage, that kind of data. We have multi-protocol: file shares, blocks, etc.

We have not implemented in a full-fledged way yet, but we expect OCI will be beneficial in helping us save on costs.

The most valuable feature is definitely the reports, the complete analysis of the data. We also like the scalability, since it can work with Hitachi, Isilon, etc. That's also a very useful part of it.

We have traditionally been customers of NetApp, we have it all over the enterprise. So far it is satisfactory. But I would like to see NetApp focus more on availability and customer support. From 7-Mode to C mode a migration happened and many features, like FTP and SFTP, were dropped. We have been using it, but there needs to be better communication when features are dropped because there are end users using it who might find it a shock: "Oh, why was that dropped?"

It's absolutely stable.

It can work with any protocol, with any vendor, any type of data or storage solution.

The tech support is pretty good. They helped to set up multiple controllers, and then we started with the analysis and the reporting.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The initial setup was good.

We used NetApp only. We worked with John Russell. He's definitely a good guy.

We have not yet saved money using the solution, but if we can implement auto-tiering, which is part of 9.5 and onwards, we will see great savings afterward.

We have evaluated other organizations, like Hitachi and Dell EMC.

OCI is a very strong product, it has so many features and a handful of features that are really good, such as analytics and the reporting.

We are not yet using the machine-learning features of this solution but we would like to. One feature we are using is the ServiceNow integration for infrastructure mapping but we're facing some troubles with it. ServiceNow has recently implemented sending an automated trigger or incident creation to ServiceNow from NetApp, and we are facing trouble due to the APIs. In terms of MTTR, we haven't calculated it yet, since it's not in production. We have only done the PoC.

We have plans to implement, or at least evaluate, products like StorageGRID and FlexPool.

If a colleague was concerned about being burned by legacy storage management products that don't work as promised, I would tell him to migrate to the cloud. It's a better way to manage the data. We can't escape on-prem. Legacy is one of the best use cases for on-prem, but cold data could be moved to the cloud.

OCI is one of NetApp's best products. I would rate it at nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is VMware performance.

It makes it easier to log into the performance of VMware. Now, we are upgrading to Microsoft Hyper-V, so it makes it easier to see improvements.

The most valuable feature is the five minute review.

The machine learning features help me troubleshoot faster.

I would like to see better graphics. We have seen regular graphs and pie graphs. I am sure that there are better ways to show this information. The graphical settings should also be easier to use.

It's stable and gives good feedback on performance.

It has good stability.

I haven't used technical support because I haven't had any big issues.

I was not part of the initial setup or deployment.

The company has saved money by narrowing down issues faster using servers and performance.

If you are using legacy products, you should upgrade.

Look into different solutions. This is one of the best solutions out there. However, each company has their different standards and requirements.

Our company does use ServiceNow as part of our infrastructure mapping.

This is a very good product. I give it a thumbs up.

Performance monitoring of hundreds of switches and being able to see results in one dashboard.

With the alerts of saturation of FC ports in their early states, we can proactively anticipate performance issues on the server or databases.

Enhance SNMP monitoring in order to broaden the number of storages that can be discovered. Review the setup of the software and divide the DB from the application and web server. Also, modularize the software more.

Four years.

No issues.

Yes, because it has a unique server module.

It is very good with a quick escalation process and delivery of new patches in a couple of weeks.

We have used and currently use other SRM softwares, but this one is more intuitive and easy to manage.

Very straightforward. You need only to define how many collectors and enable the needed firewall rules.

I do not advise about pricing: For me, it is always too much. Licensing is on TBs, and I think, nowadays that is outmoded.

A storage with 100TB or more could be the minimum in some cases. The licensing should be reviewed in number and types of storages discovered.

I was not involved in the evaluation process. However, one is the compatibility matrix: the larger, the best.

Spend a little more time in design in order to save next time when the infrastructure is active.

It's not vendor lock-in so I can collect data from different vendors, which is important for us. We are collecting data from Brocade, HP, NetApp, and EMC.

It gives us a better view of into what is happening with the environment, like performance issues or predicting problems. This is the most important part for us.

We can predict when storage will be out of space, so we can start buying before something bad happens.

It would be helpful if it were easier to create queries. It's not very intuitive.

We're still implementing so it's not in production yet; so two months only.

I don't know yet. We're still testing. For now, it's stable. No crashes.

It's just software, it's not a hardware, so I don't see that there will be problems in the future with scalability.

We haven't used technical support yet. We're still implementing so we haven't understood the architecture.

No, this is the first one. We needed to get a better view of our environment. Now we have a tube for collecting data and showing the manager the results.

We had NetApp on in our environment so we know it.

It was complex. It's new for us so there are a lot of requirements that we haven't had yet in other products, especially all these servers that we need to set for this application to run. That is not something that we usually do.

We need to prepare our environment for this product.

Our industry is healthcare but I think this product is valuable for everyone. I don't think it's uniquely valuable to our industry.

I primarily use OnCommand Insight to look at the entire stack within an organization of storage, fabrics, virtualization applications, and bare metal servers that would have agents attached. I also use it to identify workloads, size virtualization environments, and provide a CMDB of all devices with performance and capacity configuration information. 

OnCommand Insight's most valuable feature is the ability to see figure applications - you can tag applications in all the different elements of an application and have it in a single view so you can see bullies and victims and get to the root cause of problems in the environment you would otherwise be unaware of.

OnCommand Insight is really limited compared to what Cloud Insights is doing. It lacks AI to protect against ransomware and identify users accessing things abnormally.

I've been using OnCommand Insight since 2016.

OnCommand Insight is scalable.

The initial setup is pretty involved - typically, the customer needs to go through a pretty lengthy process of installing SQL servers and about two to three different servers to be able to substantiate even in a small environment.

I would rate OnCommand Insight eight out of ten.

We use it to provide storage for our clients.

NetApp gives our clients the best infrastructure with fast and easy administration. NetApp products are easy to use.

The most valuable feature is the security. When we identify a vulnerability, it is easy to mitigate it. NetApp provides the solution.

It's also easy to create and move volumes.

I would like them to develop voice commands so that I can say to the product, "Create a volume."

It's very stable. We have few problems with NetApp products and we have them in multiple companies: Modelo Group, Volkswagen of America, Volkswagen Argentina, and Volkswagen Mexico.

We can get support through their webpage or by calling and the support is good. They respond quickly, based on whether it's priority 1, priority 2, priority 3. In general, support is very fast.

The older products were medium-complex to set up but the new products are easy to set up.

Because of the stability of the product, we don't have problems.

I administrate IBM, Dell EMC, and NetApp, and I prefer NetApp.

IBM is very stable, but I prefer NetApp because it's more stable and secure.

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.