Simplifying ONTAP User Experience

[ScottPeiffer]

I am Scott Peiffer, Sr. Director from the ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing team. Thank you to our many passionate customers and partners for sharing your feedback on System Manager 9.8. This post is to provide you with background on the changes being made to ONTAP, information on how to learn more about these changes, and guidance on how best to provide feedback to NetApp.

ONTAP System Manager simplification is to directly address your changing needs as you work to support larger data sets, with new applications while expanding into hybrid multi-cloud environments. The simplification effort has been data driven. Significant time was spent on determining and setting smart defaults based on NetApp best practices, automating, and simplifying many of the everyday tasks, and then prioritized workflows that were most frequently used. Since ONTAP provides AIQ with metrics on feature usage, we were able to understand what features our customer use most and what is infrequently used.

The feedback that has been received is being considered and prioritized. To be transparent, there are other items which will not be addressed as they are considered complex, infrequent, or unneeded based on our desire to provide our customers with self-managing storage.

We also hear analysts, for example Gartner stating by 2023, 60% of organizations will use infrastructure automation tools as part of their DevOps toolchains, and improve application deployment efficiency by 25%. (source: Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation Tools, May 2020). API driven integrations will be essential to our customers success. Anecdotally, we have heard in our virtual EBCs that many of our globals and large enterprise customers are managing their infrastructure with tools such as Service Now and Remedy, and even homegrown tools that consolidate service management across various vendors in their data center, all based on API services. There are a number of such tools that operate in infrastructure and application context that we are looking to support...

To aid you in this transition we have published an extensive set of documents here: https://community.netapp.com/t5/Tech-ONTAP-Blogs/Where-can-I-learn-more-about-System-Manager-9-8/ba-p/162249

Please continue to share your feedback though your NetApp account teams! This is how we can best aggregate feedback, address your needs and respond. Help us along this journey with your improvement suggestions.

Sincerely,
Ravi Chhabria (VP Engineering)
Scott Peiffer (Sr. Director ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing)

[SomeGuy]

No doubt - the new UI is a total pooh-show.

[admin edit: email signature removed]

[iant42]

This has not simplified the user experience. Where are all the features gone, I cannot even find peering or how to run a takeover. Why foist a user interface on the public that is not user intuitive.

[BRIAN_BERKLEY]

The new UI is utter garbage. We were forced into it as our new AFF-A400 requires 9.8P1 at a minimum. If the UI were a junk car, the guys from Roadkill would pass on it. 

I don't want to rehash all of the other negative comments, but what used to be simple in terms of managing the storage has now become complicated and time consuming and NOT INTUITIVE.

[ChrisWelch]

System Manager v4 = Complete and utter garbage

Yes it may be simplifying the interface, but it has only done that by removing most of the functionality for performing day to day administration tasks. 

For instance:

- It is no longer possible to only display volumes that are more than a certain % used. You appear to only be able to  filter on available space.

- Aggregates have gone. Now hidden in Tiers, where I can't get a simple table view, they are all spread out over a dashboard, that makes simple gathering of information near impossible. How can I see which aggregates have the most free space, or indeed are getting a bit full? The used and available figures are based on fantasy. I have approx 3.5PB of raw space on my cluster, but the new interface reports that I am "using" 85.5PB. Great for Marketing, but useless to a storage admin

- Slow is not the word. How much additional CPU drain is caused by the overblown "Early Learning" interface?

I have only been using the new "improved" interface for a very short while, so I suspect I will find even more annoyances as I go. Looks like it is time to move completely over to the CLI.

If this is simplifying the user experience it is akin to Ford simplifying the interface on their cars by removing the steering wheel and pedals, and filling the boot with bags of cement.  

[chrisgeb]

Chris,

The items you mention are all fixed in ONTAP 9.9.1 which was released on 5/6/2021.  There are many more that are detailed in the customer product communiqué for (RC1) of NetApp® ONTAP® System Manager 9.9.1 management software.  The one I haven't shown in the graphics below is the performance improvements.  Engineering has been making progress in the underlying API and UI responsiveness.  9.9.1 has got better and more performance improvements are coming in future releases.

Volumes List Columns with %Used and more.

List view for tiers (aggregates)

Used and reserved is now a prominent value.

Hope this helps!

PM me if you would like to discuss further or have any other questions.  

Thanks,

Chris Gebhardt

Principal Technical Marketing Engineer - Manageability

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Glad to see NetApp is listening. I'll be interested in hearing from those who use 9.9.1 to see if it cleans up all of the missing items or just some of them.

[chrisgeb]

Tim,

Engineering is making progress...  While I would love to post our plans publicly, that's not something we can do.  My recommendation is for anyone who wants to know what these plans are, to reach out to your NetApp account team and or partner and schedule an NDA briefing on System Manager.

Another way engineering is working to get some of these features out faster is to backport changes into P releases.  A couple of the items that Glenn mentioned in his posts planned to be in P releases of 9.8.

Thanks,

Chris Gebhardt

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Nice to hear! Thanks Chris. As you can see the 9.8 interface is a huge pain point for long time users. I am intentionally delaying deploying 9.8 just based on the comments I've read in this thread. Hearing about the recent update is encouraging, and as I said I'll watch to see how real-world users feel about the update and future updates. But this appears to be a good step toward getting back to 'normal'.

While I'm 'here' I'd like to address one pain point that was introduced in 9.3's System Manager. From that point on, the GUI REQUIRES that you add an extension to snapmirror target volumes. Our standard is matching volume names, so ever since 9.3 I have to manually log onto the target system and rename the target to remove the extension. Making the extension optional would remove this irritating manual step. I also have to manually enable thin provisioning and data compaction for each new volume we replicate. Adding the ability to choose these in an 'advanced' button or something would be helpful.

[chrisgeb]

Tim,

In ONTAP 9.9.1 you can use "more options" and remove the _dest from the UI.  In 9.8 it required either a prefix or a suffix.

Hope that helps!  

Chris

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Hey @chrisgeb that is great! As I said it's been a pain point for several years. Glad to see it has finally been changed! We'll get to 9.9.1 eventually.

[SomeGuy]

Can’t install it on a 2552. --

[iant42]

One issue that is extremely bad is event/system alert notification... Having removed two disks as an installation test, the gui dashboard  just shows  two disks  missing and no red alerts. The node shell cli, clearly states re-construction but the customers sees just green,  the disk are then re-inserted and the gui now shows two disks have been inserted therefore carries on regardless of impending doom.

The eseries has an extremely  good and user friendly user interface compared with Netapp FAS/AFF.

[chrisgeb]

Ian, 

Can you confirm that you are speaking to ONTAP 9.8?  I know engineering has made many improvements in EMS alerts on the Events card on the dashboard in 9.9.1RC which is now available.

Errors

•Emergency EMS Events within the last 24 hours

•Node down (not healthy)

•Broken disk

•Shelf has error

•Network port down

•License entitlement non-compliant

Warnings

•Health Monitor Alerts (in the past 24hrs)

•Unassigned disks

•LIFs not at home port

•Volume Move information (for the past 24hrs)

•Failed Vol moves

•Vol move – admin intervention required

Let me know the version and I can confirm for you if this is the expected behavior and raise a BURT.

Thanks,

Chris

[connoisseur]

Hi!

Just updated our NetApp environment this weekend 9.8P4.

I´ve read a bunch of comments, but thought most can be handled through CLI.
But now when we are on 9.8, I find things that I used to do through GUI as it was esier than CLI.

For exampel:
1. adding local win user to SVM. Can´t find that in CLI
2. managing snapshot policy. Before you could choose policy owned by cluster-admin, but now only policys owned by the current SVM is showing up??
3. Some inconsistency we get in the "edit options" on volumes on different clusters.
We have 2 4-nodes clusters and 2 2-node clusters.

On my 4-node clusters, if I choose Edit on a volume I can only edit size, QoS, local snapshot policys (SVM bound).
But on my 2-node cluster, i get both size, QoS, local snapshots (cluster wide), Storage Efficiency (dedupe), Export policy

Why does it differ? Is it a setting I can´t find?
4. On my 4-node cluster I can´t run the "protect" option on a volume, as the GUI hangs averytime

These are some of the first things I have noticed after using the System Manager GUI first day, but will probably find more the more I use it.

[VladimirBarancok]

We are an application analysts who also own and maintain our own hardware installation - from baremetal RHEL with real time kernel, to vmware clusters with vSAN - we also purchased Netapp for unstructured data based on the feedback from colleague from other department (storage admin)

I have never had such a mixed feeling towards a product or company. I can say now a year later - yes Ontap is very stable but the GUI is such a big disappointment- it forced us to evaluate competition now that we are looking for expansion. 

With the purchase we also bought 4 days of Netapp consulting and towards the end of first day i already regretted the purchase. Every couple of minutes for simplest of tasks the consultant used CLI - saying its either impossible or he doesnt know where it is in the GUI.

When your own employees flat out refuse to use your own GUI even if customer demands it - you know you have an graphical interface problem. It shouldnt be hard to copy vmware/pure ? 

You have an amazing operating system in Ontap and basically destroyed it with the new interface and forced customers to evaluate competition (the new UI is so bad that im willing to write security compliace document for the new vendor just to get away from 9.8 mess) 

The approach taken for 9.9.1 doesnt inspire confidence that Netapp actually realizes how big of a misstep this was/is.

[Greg_Wilson]

I just did an ONTAP upgrade from 9.8P5 to 9.9.1

They have even removed the "Advanced" feature where you can specify the time it waits for "Stabilising Connections"

by default its set to 8 min

I always set it to 1  to speed up upgrades. That alone saves 28 min !

Even 9.9.1 has not added this feature back in

Has anyone any NetApp ever been an ONTAP administrator or managed these in real life..

[steve_2_lowe]

Just gone from 9.7 to 9.9.1 and am now being forced to use the new GUI, it is abysmal. If we didn't need the new S3 feature I would down grade back to 9.7.

It has far from made the GUI more user friendly, it is just rubbish. I'm back to the CLI as it's just easier for me but our support guys are really going to struggle.

NetApp, you've shot yourselves in the foot with this one. I will not be specifying NetApp as the storage solution in any new bids until this is fixed. 

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Wow, from these last comments, it sounds like things are getting worse in 9.9.1 vs. an improvement over 9.8.

@ScottPeiffer , I would love to hear any follow up comments from you. Is NetApp listening to the cacophony of complaints over 9.8/9.9/9.9.1? I for one will stay on 9.7 for the next year or more until these GUI issues are resolved.

[steve_2_lowe]

It get worse, just sat through a NetApp course where the labs where done in 9.6 because of issues with the "new" GUI.

[ChrisWelch]

Chris G, 

Glad to hear improvements are being made and NetApp has actually listed to all the noise about the new interface. 

However since these have only been released into the RC1 build in the last day or so, it will be months before any iteration of 9.9 becomes the recommended release for larger customers, and we are able to update our systems.

Thankfully we are still on a 9.7 "p" release, so have retained access to the "Classic" interface for the time being.  I just hope we can avoid having to move to 9.8 entirely. 

[hippogigantica]

I am in this same boat.  Currently we're delaying on upgrading all our storage arrays out of 9.7 mostly because the new GUI is hot garbage.  If I wanted a flashy blue-themed GUI that's confusing, I'd probably go with that other very blue-themed storage vendor.  I guess I thought NetApp was better than this.

Can I do everything I need to via the CLI?  Sure, and that's always been the case.  However, the old SysMgr not only offered a graphical operational tool, but it did so by conveying relevant information effectively.  I'd argue this made it easier to teach & learn how the storage platform fit together as a whole.  Now in v4 I'm just drowning in near-identical blue boxes.