In today’s cloud-centric landscape, organizations rely heavily on data replication technologies to ensure business continuity, disaster recovery, and high availability. SnapMirror, a powerful data replication feature from NetApp, plays a vital role in replicating data across ONTAP environments — including AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN). But even the most robust replication strategy needs deep visibility and proactive monitoring to deliver true reliability. That’s where NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights comes into play.
The Challenge with Data Replication in the Cloud
SnapMirror is designed to efficiently replicate data between ONTAP systems, whether on-premises or in the cloud. With FSxN, you get all the benefits of ONTAP in a fully managed AWS service. However, as your cloud footprint grows and data volumes scale, it becomes increasingly difficult to track:
- The health of each replication relationship
- Lag times between source and destination
- Transfer efficiency and throughput
- Failover readiness
Traditional monitoring tools often lack granular insight into SnapMirror operations, especially across hybrid or cloud-native environments. This blind spot can lead to missed SLAs, data inconsistency, or recovery delays.
Enter NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights
NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights is a modern observability solution that delivers real-time visibility across hybrid cloud multi-vendor environments. By monitoring FSxN with Data Infrastructure Insights, you gain full-stack awareness of your SnapMirror relationships with powerful dashboards, proactive alerts, and historical analytics.
Key Benefits of Monitoring SnapMirror
1. Proactive Alerting for Replication Issues
Data Infrastructure Insights continuously monitors SnapMirror states — idle, transferring, broken-off, or failed — and triggers alerts when anomalies arise. This helps teams respond faster to issues before they impact recovery objectives.
2. Visualize Lag and Transfer Metrics
Track replication lag time in real-time, across all volumes and relationships. Dashboards make it easy to spot underperforming links or bottlenecks, helping you take corrective actions quickly.
3. Correlation with Infrastructure Metrics
Data Infrastructure Insights doesn't just stop at SnapMirror — it correlates replication performance with underlying FSxN storage health, network latency, and IOPS trends. This holistic view enables smarter troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
4. Simplified Compliance and Reporting
With built-in historical analysis and exportable reports, Data Infrastructure Insights helps document replication SLAs and demonstrate recovery readiness — a must for audits, compliance, and disaster recovery planning.
5. Scalable Insights for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
Whether you're replicating from on-prem ONTAP to FSxN, or FSxN to FSxN across regions, Data Infrastructure Insights provides a single pane of glass to monitor it all. This unified visibility is essential for modern, distributed data architectures.
Final Thoughts
As cloud adoption accelerates, ensuring the reliability and performance of data replication is more critical than ever. Monitoring SnapMirror with Data Infrastructure Insights empowers teams to move from reactive to proactive operations — improving data resilience, reducing downtime, and enhancing operational confidence.
Ready to get started?
Reach out to your NetApp representative or request a demo to learn how you can integrate FSxN visibility into your observability strategy.
