On September 16th, NetApp is pleased to launch ONTAP Essentials as an extension in Cloud Insights for all ONTAP Customers as part of their Advisor and above Support contracts.
ONTAP Essentials enables customers to monitor and visualize NetApp on-prem or cloud hosted storage infrastructure with all the benefits of SaaS
- SaaS based solution – no on-prem footprint to procure or maintain.
- Scales to cover your entire world wide enterprise storage footprint.
- Out of the Box zero configuration best practice monitoring and alerting in near realtime.
- Powerful Capabilities: User Defined Dashboards and Monitors, power consumption monitoring, understand your storage performance and health in context of virtualized compute.
In this first in a series of blog posts, we’ll show you how to get started with cloud-based monitoring, and in subsequent posts walk you through connectivity with adjacent infrastructure like VMware, and customization of your experience.
Getting Started w/Cloud Insights.
If you’ve never used Cloud Insights or Cloud Central before, Navigate here to setup a Cloud Central account and access Cloud Insights for the first time. Sign up for the free trial – it will allow you to view your ONTAP systems and how they interact with K8s as well as trying any of Cloud Insights many other data collectors. After 30 days, should you choose not to continue a subscription to Cloud Insights Premium Edition, your tenant will be downgraded to Basic Edition.
Connecting Data ONTAP to Cloud Insights.
Once you have an account and are setup, the standard onboarding workflow will take you directly to the 'Add Data Collector' screen below. If you're an existing customer and don't have ONTAP systems added, select ONTAP Essentials from the left hand navigation. This being your first time here you will see a page like the following:
Clicking on the ‘View all available ONTAP Collectors’ link at the right will take you to a screen that lets you add your ONTAP system:
If you’re running a relatively current version of ONTAP on-prem, or cloud hosted Cloud Volumes ONTAP they can connect to Cloud Insights directly. Select ‘Cloud Connection for ONTAP 9.9+’ or ‘Cloud Volumes ONTAP’. If you’re running an older version of ONTAP on-prem, select appropriately, e.g.: ‘ONTAP Data Management Software’, and it will walk you through setup.
When setting up a cloud connection, Cloud Insights creates a secure token for the specific ONTAP system being connected. Copy the token, paste it into ONTAP System Manager and the connection process should automatically complete. Depending on the size of your system the first collection make take some time before your system shows up. Check back in 15-30 minutes - afterwards data will stay current.
Enabling Monitoring
Once you’ve added an ONTAP system and the first collection completes, you’ll see it show up under ONTAP Essentials->Overview. We’ll walk through that more in the next post - first, let’s go enable monitoring. Cloud Insights Monitors are rules that are checked whenever new data arrives – and generate an Alert once a rule matches. Cloud Insights includes a large number of pre-defined ONTAP Monitors embodying NetApp’s best practices.
Under Observability->Alerts->Manage Monitors we’ll see the ‘ONTAP Infrastructure’ group of monitors. Select the three dots two the right of the group and click resume. This will start monitoring all your ONTAP systems for critical infrastructure issues, from hardware failures to security. NetApp recommends enabling all monitors in this group as best practice. You can view the monitors in the ONTAP Infrastructure group to the right to find out more about them.
Alerts will now be available under the Alerts menu when they occur. Alerts are available both under ONTAP Essentials->Alerts (ONTAP specific Alerts) and Observability -> Alerts (All Alerts).
How did the setup process work for you? Did Cloud Insight raise any alerts that you’d otherwise had missed? Try out some of the advanced features like Kubernetes while your trial license is active and see how Cloud Insights gives you end to end awareness from Application to Storage. Please share your experience below in the comments.
Next UP: ONTAP Essentials, a quick tour.
