What is Cloud Insights?

NetApp^® Cloud Insights brings observability to the BlueXP control plane. It is easy to deploy and use. Map complex infrastructures and gain X-ray vision into the performance and utilization of multivendor hybrid cloud workloads. The truth is out there—discover it now.

Modern infrastructures typically include on-premises technology from a mix of vendors and rely on multiple cloud providers. But no matter where all your servers, VMs, and storage live, they all add up to one (potentially complex) hybrid multicloud environment. The big takeaway? Your ability to see and understand the big picture and connect the dots between resources and issues is crucial to maintaining security, performance, and cost control.

Inefficiencies, wasted space, and idle resources are cloud-budget-eating zombies that commonly account for 32% of cloud spend.

The problem is that too many monitoring tools are vendor specific or lack key mapping or troubleshooting capabilities, leaving you with more blind spots than a mirrorless 18-wheeler in rush-hour traffic. Does this mean that multiple monitoring tools are the only answer in hybrid clouds? Only if you like wasting time.

Full visibility is provided into every corner of your hybrid cloud environment so that you can keep moving forward with confidence. Need an inventory of all on-premises and cloud resources and their interdependencies? You got it. Would real-time data visualization of infrastructure-wide availability, performance, and utilization be helpful for troubleshooting, keeping customers happy, and controlling costs? Enjoy the power of a unified view. Worried about setup time or challenges? Set it and forget it with easy-to-use, SaaS-based simplicity.

Even for administrators who eat complexity for breakfast, figuring out how one component impacts another in your hybrid infrastructure is a big ask. Fortunately, the machine learning employed by the observability service is virtually insatiable. It automatically builds topologies to correlate metrics. And it constantly monitors for greedy or degraded resources and resource contention—all without “screaming” at you with unnecessary alerts, thanks to easy and precise customization.

• Monitor. Collect full-stack infrastructure wide metrics.
  
• Troubleshoot. Fix problems faster.
• Optimize. Manage resources more effectively and do more with less.
• Secure. Detect ransomware and threats to IP before they impact your business.

Start monitoring fast with ONTAP Essentials, a feature for all editions of Cloud Insights. It provides a set of pre-configured set of dashboards and workflows that provide detailed views into your NetApp ONTAP health, inventories, workloads, and data protection, including days-to-full predictions for storage capacity and performance. All without the need for user intervention. Start collecting storage metrics immediately.

• Inventory: Complete ONTAP managed storage inventory 
• Dashboards: Detailed ONTAP storage infrastructure overview dashboards 
• Storage usage: Days-to-full for storage capacity predictions and warning 
• Monitors: Pre-built monitors for health, performance, network traffic, and capacity risks 
• Alerts: Comprehensive alerts for infrastructure assets, storage VMs, nodes, clusters, storage etc.

From holding your intellectual property hostage, stealing it outright or just deleting your data, bad guys are out for your data. And regulators are waiting in the wings to levy steep fines for compliance missteps. Machine learning is used to analyze data access patterns and keep you a step ahead with:

• Ransomware detection or mass file deletion incidents. Get early alerts with actionable intelligence and automated policies.
  • Automatically initiate Snapshot™ copies in NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® for nearly instant remediation.
  • Automatically restrict data access of user flagged for anomalous behavior.
• Data misuse and theft alerts. Instantly spot user-behavior weirdness related to key intellectual property and respond faster.
• Usage audits. Ensure compliance and assess risk by auditing usage patterns of critical data wherever it resides.
• File forensic. Easily determine what files may have been compromised.

What sounds better, a different monitoring tool for every resource, or a single tool that can see across all your on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure? Thought so. From the public cloud to the data center, Cloud Insights delivers full-stack visibility of infrastructure and applications from hundreds of collectors in one place. You get:

• Comprehensive support for on- and off-premises devices paired with an API for ingestion from open collectors like Telegraf
• Customizable metrics based on your strategic goals and needs
• Free API access for Premium, Standard, and Basic Cloud Insights versions for existing NetApp customers

Think there are no good tools for dropping into Kubernetes clusters to find problems and inefficiencies? Think again. Simple views of clusters are provided, making it easier to spot and fix issues.

• Get topological with the ability to map persistent volume claims to the storage infrastructure.
• Identify performance issues and resource constraints, whether they’re internal to the cluster or on the infrastructure supporting it.
• Correlate pod or namespace performance metrics to back-end storage metrics for truly end-to-end visibility of your containerized applications.

The thing about the hybrid multicloud is that it’s easy to deploy but hard to optimize. Especially when you consider the performance versus cost tradeoffs you have to make to meet the needs of your developers and operations teams. So how can you strike the right balance and avoid getting blindsided by unnecessarily high costs? Cloud Insights gives you a clear window into inefficiencies.   

• Proactively identify issues, such as incorrectly tiered applications or VM over- or underutilization, to reduce waste and prevent bottlenecks.
• Improve business unit and budget holder decision making through integrated business intelligence that lets you easily slice and dice the comprehensive infrastructure-wide metrics collected by Cloud Insights.
• Optimize public cloud resources with detailed cost reporting.
• Delay or reduce on-prem resource purchases with more efficient use of existing assets.

When you’re dealing with complex hybrid infrastructures, different teams naturally have lots of questions. Do I need to look at on-prem, cloud or both? Many monitoring tools require specialized training or skills, even though monitoring complex environments isn’t just one or two people's jobs—it’s everyone’s. Cloud Insights customers find that it quickly becomes their favorite go-to tool supporting both on-prem and the multicloud from the same console. With SaaS-based Cloud Insights, whether used separately or integrated into the unified BlueXP control plane, there's no software to install and maintain, updates are transparent, and virtually anyone can gain insights quickly thanks to an easy-to-use dashboard gallery.

• Get quick answers to important questions, such as "Where can I reclaim AWS or Azure waste?"  "Where do I have ONTAP latency issues?" "Where are there opportunities to right-size my VMware clusters?" And much more.

• Quickly and easily create new dashboards using an extensive set of visualization types and an intuitive dashboard creation interface.
• Minimize noise with built-in filters and finders.

Alerts are great… when they’re relevant. Otherwise, they quickly become distracting informational "white noise." Make sure that the alerts people receive matter, with easy customization in Cloud Insights.

• Stay focused on what matters with targeted, conditional alerts.
• Choose the best delivery channel, including email, Slack, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow, based on internal workflows via open integration with third-party messaging and ticketing systems.
• Meet SLOs and SLAs during and after your move to the cloud.