NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The fact that it gives us a way to report usage for the arrays that we have, issues that we have.

It's a reporting tool so we can see where we get issues with latency, and we can see issues with port saturation, and it shows us each of our clients.

Personally, some of the older things that HPE created originally, you could dig a little bit deeper into each client in certain ways that OCI doesn't quite do.

With HPE we could look at very specific port-to-port on there, per array that we have. Whereas the OCI, you can still do that but the way it's done is a little bit... When I look at a host, I can't look at the entire host. I can only look at different LUNS on that host and that can be a problem sometimes.

A year and a half now.

Stability is good. No issues with OCI.

It's got some things that are good and we still use some other reporting tools to mix in with it, but it is good overall.

I have not used it.

I was not involved.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria are what's easiest, what's quickest to train on and that way we can get into all of the different engineers' hands and get them up to speed fastest on it.

Functionally we're able to use it to troubleshoot pretty quickly. So it's come on and it's replaced a lot of the HPE tools that we were using before. What would make it a 10 out of 10 for me are some of the niche things that we would want to see, so that it could do some of the troubleshooting even a little bit better and a little bit faster.

For troubleshooting, for the way we use it, it's good. And for a large environment, it seems to have been integrated in pretty well.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.