Make your own luck with Active IQ
Rip Wilson
One of my favorite characters in the movie Deadpool 2 was Domino. In one scene, she came in for an interview and was asked about her superhero qualifications. She said, “I’m lucky. Everything just usually works out for me.” Turns out she really was lucky, but what about you? Are you lucky?
We all own things that can break: cars, electronics, appliances. Over time, they might stop working altogether or just not work as well as they once did. Do you roll the dice and trust your luck with those items?
When the consequences are small, for things like your dishwasher or your TV, you probably do. You buy a brand that you trust and take a chance that you won’t have a major problem. And if your luck runs out, you'll be OK for a few days while you come up with a solution. But what about products where the consequences are significant and immediate, such as with your car or your home’s furnace? Do you trust your luck then?
I love the expression “make your own luck,” and the best way to do that is to be proactive. Properly servicing your car or your furnace ensures that it keeps working well and can significantly reduce the chance of an untimely issue. You aren’t simply lucky that the furnace kept blowing warm air on the coldest night of the year or that the brakes stopped your car fast enough to avoid an accident—you made your own luck.
Your storage system is a lot more like your furnace than your dishwasher. It’s critical to your business, and you need to make your own luck. That means buying a brand that you trust and being proactive with the care of your system. A high-quality storage system that’s well maintained and in tip-top shape is unlikely to have problems when you need it most. That’s where the NetApp® Active IQ® digital advisor comes in.
Address issues before they’re problems
Active IQ simplifies the proactive care and optimization of your NetApp storage. It was designed to uncover potential issues and to give you insights, guidance, and actions to fix them before they become problems and affect your business. Kind of like a warning light on your car’s dashboard telling you that the oil is low. It’s not a problem yet, but it will be if you don’t act.
Active IQ constantly monitors your storage environment, using predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to look for misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities, outdated firmware, failing components, rapid growth, and other risk factors. Anything that might jeopardize your system availability, security, or health receives attention.
When a potential issue is identified, Active IQ takes immediate action, such as automatically opening a support case, or it provides clear guidance for you to eliminate a risk or optimize a configuration. Being proactive has never been easier.
Stop putting off those upgrades
An easy way for you to reduce risk and to improve storage health is to upgrade your storage software. Upgrades correct bugs, increase resilience, eliminate security vulnerabilities, introduce new features, and improve overall performance. And good news, that support contract of yours includes software upgrades. Yet again, you can make your own luck.Yes, upgrades can take some time, they’re easy to defer, and they’re even easier to forget about. But no more excuses. Active IQ is there so that things go smoothly. It makes recommendations, highlights benefits, checks interoperability, and outlines all the steps in the upgrade process. And firmware updates are even easier with Ansible playbooks that fully automate the process.
Get more than just a problem solver
Uncovering potential risks and providing upgrade assistance are two of the core capabilities of Active IQ, but it also provides a wide range of features that help improve the performance and efficiency of your environment:- Lower your storage costs. See inactive data that can be automatically tiered from flash to cost-effective object storage with FabricPool
- See what has changed. Config Drift helps you deal with configuration gaps and anomalies by detecting systems that have deviated from your defined templates.
- Go from good to great. The Health Check dashboard gives you categorized health scores based on known performance indicators, along with best practices recommendations to improve your system uptime, performance, and security.
- Know your workloads. Understand what workloads are on your NetApp ONTAP® powered system and are candidates to move to the cloud.
- Track growth. Capacity trending and forecasting help you make sure that your critical workloads have the space they need. And if your system exceeds 90% capacity or is projected to do so in the next 1, 3, or 6 months, with the click of a button, you can request a quote for more capacity.
Have it your way
Get Active IQ alerts, insights and guidance in the way that works best for you. The redesigned and full-featured web UI provides views and workflows that make it easy for you to keep an eye on your environment and know exactly which actions to take. Then there’s a mobile app to keep you informed when you’re on the go, and API services enable you to programmatically integrate Active IQ directly into your DevOps or change-management workflows.You can also find Active IQ right on the landing page of the NetApp Support site, as well as in Active IQ Unified Manager and NetApp Cloud Insights. It’s easy for you to identify potential issues and to act quickly to avoid disruptions or to optimize your systems.
And there’s more. Active IQ gives NetApp Cloud Manager visibility into your on-premises systems. Now it’s even easier to add undiscovered clusters to Cloud Manager, to identify unused NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP licenses, and to download available firmware updates.
Simple, intelligent storage health with Active IQ
Being proactive about storage health is the best way to make your own luck. Active IQ makes it easy by providing constant visibility into the health of your environment, letting you know when your attention is required and giving you clear guidance for any actions.Active IQ is available to all NetApp customers who have an active support contract (features vary by product and support tier). If you already have a single sign-on, you can log in and get started now. Or to learn more, visit the Active IQ page.
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.
