NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

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 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.

Performance monitoring.

It is uniquely valuable because it lets you see everything from the storage to our virtual or VM environment. It does the whole path; it does storage, the fiber channel, the network, and the fee center.

We're not using it to its full potential, so it is hard to provide feedback here.

Two years.

So far, the stability is good.

I haven't looked into the scalability yet.

I haven't used technical support yet.

We purchased this solution because we didn't have anything to do trending, forecasting, or reporting.

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

I used a NetApp engineer to implement it. The engineer's expertise was very good.

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.

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.

• 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.

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 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.