Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP) is a robust, enterprise‑grade storage service. It provides a rich set of capabilities for optimizing accessibility, resilience and data protection, security, price / performance, and workload mobility. For many organizations running critical workloads on AWS, FSx for ONTAP is not the challenge—it is the foundation. The challenge begins when they need to operate all these capabilities together, consistently and optimally, across a growing data estate.
Making the right operational decision rarely ends with a simple, default configuration. Rather, it requires applying best practices by understanding how workloads behave, how they scale, how they are protected, how much they cost to run, and how they fit into the broader AWS architecture. And as environments grow, even experienced storage administrators and cloud architects can find themselves spending increasing amounts of time understanding best practice guidance and translating it into day‑to‑day actions.
This is where NetApp® Workload Factory, the best-practice orchestration service shines. And with the introduction of the new Ask Me agent, planning, deploying, and operating FSx for ONTAP workloads according to best practices have become quicker, simpler and more precise than ever. Let’s take a closer look at this new capability.
The real challenge: Operating a large‑scale FSx for ONTAP data estate correctly
FSx for ONTAP provides a powerful and flexible set of capabilities. Performance tuning, capacity management, snapshot and replication strategies, security features, and cost optimization mechanisms are all available – but none of them exist in isolation.
In practice, the “right” configuration depends on the workload consuming the storage, its use case, performance profile, growth pattern, protection requirements, and cost constraints. As a result, operating an FSx for ONTAP estate is not simply a “default settings” task; it is a workload‑aware, multi‑domain operational challenge.
Best practices for FSx for ONTAP and AWS workloads are well documented, but documentation alone does not scale. Continuously applying those practices across multiple systems, and adjusting them as workloads evolve, requires significant effort – even for highly skilled teams. The gap is not a lack of guidance, but the lack of tools that operationalize that guidance.
NetApp Workload Factory: Operationalizing best practices across the FSx for ONTAP lifecycle
Workload Factory bridges this gap by turning best practices into built-in capabilities across the full FSx for ONTAP workload lifecycle. Instead of asking users to interpret documentation and manually enforce guidance, Workload Factory embeds those best practices directly into the tools used for planning, deployment, and operations.
During the planning phase, Workload Factory helps teams make informed decisions before anything is deployed. Total cost of ownership (TCO) calculators and migration advisors provide early insight into architectural tradeoffs, workload placement, and cost implications, reducing uncertainty later on.
During deployment, Workload Factory guides users through best‑practice configurations using deployment wizards and automatically generated Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) snippets for use in customers’ automation workflows. This helps maintain the FSx for ONTAP environments consistent, repeatable, and aligned with recommended designs from the start.
Once workloads are running, Workload Factory focuses on day‑2 operations. Well‑architected dashboards continuously evaluate environments against best practices across reliability, cost optimization, operational excellence, security, and performance. They detect improper setup or drift from optimized states and suggest remediations. AI‑powered event analysis simplifies handling of complex log data, and access to advanced FSx for ONTAP capabilities further reduces operational overhead. And finally, agentic interaction with Ask Me provides the ultimate experience in operational tooling.
Ask Me agent: Agentic interface with infrastructure monitoring and analysis
The Ask Me agent is where operational intelligence becomes truly accessible.
At its core, Ask Me is a natural‑language, agentic interface within Workload Factory. Rather than navigating multiple dashboards or manually correlating metrics, users can interact with their FSx for ONTAP environment by asking questions in plain English—much like they would ask a trusted FSx for ONTAP expert.
Ask Me is not a chatbot layered on top of monitoring data. It is an agent that understands both FSx for ONTAP best practices and your specific environment—and can reason across the two.
Behind the scenes, Ask Me draws on two complementary sources of intelligence.
The first is a curated FSx for ONTAP knowledge base that includes documentation, blogs, videos, and expert‑authored slide decks. This provides a deep domain understanding of how FSx for ONTAP features interact and what is the best practice in different scenarios.
The second source is a live connection to the customer’s FSx for ONTAP data estate through a model context protocol (MCP) server. This allows Ask Me to analyze real configurations, behavior, and events in the production environment.
When you ask a question, Ask Me combines these two perspectives. It analyzes the current state of your environment, applies best‑practice context, and explains what it sees. Just as importantly, it explains why something matters and what to do next.
Figure 1: Ask Me high-level architecture
Ask Me goes beyond static monitoring and reactive alerts, providing continuous, context‑aware analysis that supports informed operational decisions—especially in complex, large-scale FSx for ONTAP environments.
From questions to action: Real-world examples
To best understand Ask Me, let’s see it in action. In this example, we see a ransomware readiness assessment in the UI.
Figure 2: Ask the question
Above is an example of a question a storage admin might ask before an audit or as part of an ongoing security assessment: “Assess my ransomware protection readiness. Give me a detailed status report and recommended next steps.”
Figure 3: Ask Me gathers real environment data
Having received the question, Ask Me switches from conversation to action: It discovers FSx for ONTAP file systems across regions, and pulls the configuration and protection signals required for analysis (for example, Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) status, snapshot and backup policies, replication coverage, and access controls). In the UI, you can see the agent’s progress as it executes these discovery and assessment steps. You can also see the API call itself by selecting “show details”.
Figure 4: Ask Me compiles an executive summary—a readiness report you can act on
Once data collection is complete, Ask Me produces a comprehensive ransomware protection readiness report. The report starts with an executive summary that rolls up your posture across file systems (including where critical issues exist, where warnings exist, and where systems cannot be fully scanned due to missing connectivity, such as an inactive Workload Factory Link).
Figure 5: Drill into the findings
Scrolling through the report, Ask Me breaks the results down by protection pillar, so you can immediately see what is misconfigured, why it matters, and how to change it. For example, you’ll see sections that call out unprotected volumes for ARP, missing snapshot policies and scheduled backups, gaps in remote replication coverage, and critical exposure items such as unauthorized iSCSI access.
Figure 6: Remediation plan
To close the loop, based on the question in this example, Ask Me also generates a prioritized remediation plan (in this example ordered by priority – P1, P2, P3), so teams can move from assessment to execution—starting with immediate fixes (like tightening access controls and enabling ARP), then strengthening recovery points (snapshot policies and backups), and finally expanding offsite resilience (SnapMirror® replication) across the volumes that matter most.
Summary, and what we suggest doing next
FSx for ONTAP provides a powerful foundation for running workloads on AWS, but operating it correctly at scale is complex. Workload Factory addresses this challenge by embedding best practices directly into planning, deployment, and day‑2 operations.
With the Ask Me agent, that operational intelligence becomes intuitive and accessible. By combining deep FSx for ONTAP knowledge with live insight into your actual environment, Ask Me enables agentic monitoring and analysis through simple, natural‑language interaction.
If you are operating FSx for ONTAP workloads on AWS, or you're planning to, this is an excellent time to start NetApp Workload Factory today, and try Ask Me for yourself.