How to simplify management of your NetApp environment
Rip Wilson
What’s the best way to monitor and manage your data storage environment? No one wants to juggle 10 or 20 different tools but trying to do everything with just one tool has its own set of challenges. The optimal solution is what I call “complementary specialization”—several applications, each with a differentiated purpose, working together to share information and to provide a seamless experience.
Complementary specialization is the approach that NetApp takes with NetApp® Active IQ®, Cloud Insights, and Active IQ Unified Manager (formerly OnCommand® Unified Manager). Each has a differentiated purpose, but they’re complementary products that help you simplify monitoring, management, protection, and optimization of your hybrid multicloud infrastructure.
At a high level, I think of these products as working together to provide you with deep and wide coverage:
- Unified Manager gives you a deep focus on your NetApp AFF and FAS systems.
- Active IQ looks across your entire data fabric (and the NetApp installed base).
- Cloud Insights takes an even wider view of your entire multivendor, multicloud environment.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
With Active IQ Unified Manager, you can easily monitor the health, availability, capacity, performance, and data protection status of your on-premises AFF and FAS systems. You get alerts and notifications for proactive management, as well as timely system analysis and recommendations to solve any performance issues. Unified Manager is your go-to product for day-to-day administration of your AFF and FAS systems.
Active IQ takes a broader approach. You get simple and secure visibility into the health of all your NetApp systems, from AFF and FAS to Cloud Volumes, StorageGRID®, E-Series, SolidFire®, and NetApp HCI deployments. What’s more, Active IQ is your digital advisor, using artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to give you deep insights and prescriptive guidance for your NetApp environment. Fueled by telemetry data from over 300,000 systems across our highly diverse installed base, Active IQ works relentlessly in the background to uncover opportunities for you to proactively protect and optimize your storage environment. By following its AI-derived guidance, you can reduce risk, increase data availability, and simplify management.
Cloud Insights goes beyond NetApp storage. This cloud-based infrastructure monitoring tool gives you visibility into your complete multivendor, multicloud infrastructure. Its advanced data collection and analytics capabilities enable you to monitor, to troubleshoot, and to optimize all your resources—from public clouds to your private data centers. Whether it’s identifying abandoned resources or uncovering resource contention and degradation to quickly restore affected workloads, there’s no better way to keep an eye on your entire environment than Cloud Insights.
Working Together
A big part of complementary specialization is the sharing of information so that these products aren’t three isolated tools. Active IQ is the conduit for this functionality.Active IQ is a cloud-based offering with its own web UI, mobile app, and API support, but you can also view Active IQ predictive risks, alerts, and insights directly from Unified Manager and Cloud Insights. If Cloud Insights is your primary dashboard for daily monitoring of your entire environment, you can track Active IQ predictive alerts and quickly act when a risk arises (screenshot below). Active IQ also sends its prescriptive intelligence directly to Unified Manager, making it easy for you to identify issues and to act quickly to avoid disruptions and to optimize your NetApp ONTAP® systems.
But it isn’t a one-way flow of information. Unified Manager shares its deep, granular performance and capacity data with Active IQ. This data is added to the Active IQ multipetabyte data lake and is used to strengthen Active IQ predictive analytics, machine learning, and community wisdom. Yep, Active IQ keeps getting smarter.
Start Simplifying Storage Management Today
If you’re a NetApp customer with AFF or FAS systems, you’re already familiar with Unified Manager, as well as ONTAP System Manager (formerly OnCommand System Manager), which enables you to easily configure ONTAP clusters. However, it’s possible that the extensive features of Active IQ and Cloud Insights are a surprise to you. I encourage you to give them a try and to see their value and synergies for yourself.Active IQ is available to all customers with an active support contract. Watch the video below to learn more, or get started now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeNrVTwBUp0
Cloud Insights has a 14-day free trial as well as a basic version that monitors your NetApp infrastructure at no cost. For more information, the video below provides a great overview of Cloud Insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvlem71l-Pg
Whether you need to manage a single storage system or monitor a multivendor, multicloud environment, NetApp has the management tools to simplify your day-to-day activities.
Rip Wilson
Rip Wilson is a principal product marketing manager at NetApp with over 20 years of experience developing compelling messaging and content that communicates our unique business value. Rip holds a degree in business management from Georgia Tech. He is based in Colorado and enjoys golf, tennis, and poker.
