Cloud Insights Launches New Features, Enhances Monitoring and Security for Across Your IT Infrastructure
Joshua Moore
It’s been a year since we launched NetApp Cloud Insights. Over this year, we have continued to enhance the product to do even more for you, across even more of your IT environment. In June, we announced the availability of the Basic Edition, a version of Cloud Insights free to all NetApp customers.
Our efforts to enhance Cloud Insights have been guided by our goal of making it easier to monitor your complex hybrid environment with easily constructed widgets and dashboards that answer key questions. A recent TechValidate survey that we conducted among Cloud Insights users found that 74% of respondents valued the product’s ability to give them a single consolidated view of all their infrastructure more than any other capability. 
Figure 1) TechValidate Cloud Insights Survey – Valued Features
We continue to enhance the breadth and depth of Cloud Insights coverage. Now, at INSIGHT 2019, we’re announcing three new important features aimed at improving your ability to manage and secure your entire IT Infrastructure—from on-premises multi-vendor systems to multi-cloud including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. These features are:
- Kubernetes Topology Visualization
- Cloud Secure Insider Threat Detection
- Active IQ Integration
Kubernetes Topology Visualization
Figure 2) Kubernetes Cluster Topology view in Cloud Insights
Unlike today’s typical monitoring tools, Cloud Insights is designed to handle the complex and transient nature of modern applications and cloud infrastructure. This allows you to gain a complete understanding of demand, latency, errors, and the saturation points of all your services.
Modern applications are built for cloud-based architectures to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of containers and microservices. As containers have brought complexities of their own, Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto standard for managing containerized applications across a cluster of nodes.
View Kubernetes Architecture Through a Topology
But gaining insight into Kubernetes can be difficult. Now, we’re releasing a new Cloud Insights’ feature called Kubernetes Cluster Explorer. This feature visualizes Kubernetes clusters with a simple topology view. Ultimately, this enhancement makes it much easier for non-experts and experts alike to understand K8s in their environment.Monitor the Health of Your Kubernetes Clusters
Through simple dynamic dashboards, you can see critical Kubernetes KPIs, such as scaling metrics and restart counts, and easily highlight pods and containers that are experiencing instability or resource constraints. You can identify issues at the cluster level, and simply zoom down to find containers in trouble.Cloud Secure: Insider Threat Detection
Ensuring the security of your corporate data is no easy task, and the consequences of inadequate security measures are staggering. But now you can meet this immense challenge and protect your data with help from NetApp. To help keep your critical data secure from insider threats like compromised users and bad actors, we’re introducing a new feature called Cloud Secure.
With Cloud Secure, you gain an unprecedented level of visibility into your corporate data on NetApp infrastructure, whether it’s in your own data centers or in the cloud. Cloud Secure gives you a holistic view of how your corporate data is accessed and by whom. In a nutshell, Cloud Secure imparts timely and accurate visibility and control so that you can quickly respond to insider threats based on a thorough understanding of user access and user behavior.
Cloud Secure uses machine learning to detect risks to your data without needing any explicit rules or other complex configuration steps. Through pattern recognition and anomaly detection, Cloud Secure enables you to confidently protect your organization’s data from being misused by malicious or compromised users.
Cloud Secure alerts you of behaviors that are outside a user’s normal usage pattern, even if that user has approved credentials. It’s this kind of detection that catches compromised users, bad actors, and crucially, ransomware infections.
Protecting your data for the sake of your business and your customers is only part of the equation. Cloud Secure also helps you comply with legal regulations for data security. With Cloud Secure, you can monitor and audit all user data access in real time and automatically take actions, such as updating protection policies, validating permissions, and restricting access.
Active IQ Integration
Figure 3) Cloud Insight dashboard showing Active IQ risks
For over two decades NetApp has been collecting data that aggregates and anonymizes information from our entire global customer footprint of hardware and software systems. We are now using AI and ML capabilities to deliver predictive and prescriptive insights and guidance. The results are compelling. Over the last year alone, Active IQ saved customers over 2 million hours of lost productivity due to avoided downtime. Now Cloud Insights is fully integrated with Active IQ to give you visibility into the predictive analytics of Active IQ.
Together, Active IQ and Cloud Insights span the entirety of any hybrid multi-cloud environment, no matter how complex, acting as the only solution to provide a single source of truth for the performance of an entire infrastructure (not just NetApp products) in real-time.
Want to experience how Cloud Insights can reduce your IT failures, optimize your resources and secure your data? Try our 14-day free trial today!
Joshua Moore
Joshua is a Principal Technologist within the Cloud Analytics team at NetApp, and has spent many years in the field helping clients achieve their business goals with NetApp technology. He has a service provider background where, prior to his tenure at NetApp, held architecture and service strategy roles within a global systems integrator. His primary focus is on identifying where and how Cloud Analytics can help organizations better meet their service level objectives, cost constraints and business goals in the near term, and more effectively realize their hybrid cloud strategy in the long term.
