See Your Entire ONTAP Installed Base's Upgrade Readiness in One View — Introducing UHC v9

[yuvaraju]

If you manage a multi-cluster ONTAP environment, this one's for you

ONTAP upgrades are not just a technical task — they're a planning exercise. For teams managing multiple clusters spread across business units and data centers, the question "which clusters are ready to upgrade?" quickly becomes harder to answer than it should be.

UHC v9 is built to answer that question. Two new capabilities — a multi-cluster upgrade readiness dashboard and automated email delivery for reports — make environment-wide upgrade planning faster, more visible, and easier to act on.

The Multi-Cluster Upgrade Readiness Dashboard

 

The challenge it solves

Until now, understanding upgrade readiness across your environment meant opening individual cluster reports one at a time, manually tracking status somewhere, and re-checking when things changed. There was no single place to see the state of everything at once.

The UHC dashboard changes that.

Figure 1: UHC v9 Multi-Cluster Upgrade Readiness Dashboard — environment-level summary cards and cluster table

 

An environment-level view, generated automatically

Every time UHC runs, it automatically generates a static HTML dashboard at runs/dashboard/index.html. No extra configuration. No separate tool. Just open it in a browser.

At the top of the dashboard, five summary cards give you an immediate answer to what's happening across your environment:

• Ready — Clusters with no blockers, cleared for upgrade today
• Blocked — Clusters with critical issues that must be resolved before upgrading
• Errors — Clusters where the UHC run itself encountered a problem (connection, authentication, or data collection failure)
• Stale — Clusters whose last run is more than 7 days old; the health data needs refreshing before you act on it
• Environment Total — Total number of clusters tracked in the last 30 days

Each card is also a filter. Click "Blocked" and the table below immediately shows you only the blocked clusters. Click "Ready" to see which ones you can schedule for upgrade this cycle.

 

What you see for each cluster

Below the summary cards, an environment overview table gives you the latest run data for every cluster in one place:

• Cluster name and management IP
• Status: Ready, Blocked, Error, or Stale
• Number of blockers — critical issues that must be fixed before the upgrade
• Number of at-risk findings — issues flagged during the pre-update check
• Number of warnings — non-blocking items you can choose to address or carry forward
• Target ONTAP version the cluster was assessed against
• Node inventory with hardware model
• Direct links to the full HTML, Excel, JSON, and log report for that run
• Timestamp of the last run, with a relative indicator ("3 days ago")

Use the Search bar to quickly find a specific cluster by name. The dashboard scales to 100+ ONTAP clusters from a single VM.

 

Drill down without switching tools

Figure 2: Clicking a cluster in the dashboard opens its full detailed report — blockers, at-risk findings, node details, and KB article links

From the dashboard, clicking into a cluster opens the full detailed report for that cluster — showing every blocker and risk in detail, the specific nodes impacted, remediation steps, and KB article links. You do not need to open a separate file or navigate elsewhere.

Refresh without re-running

If you want to regenerate the dashboard from your existing run history — without connecting to any cluster — run:

./uhc --dashboard

This pulls from the last 30 days of runs already stored locally and rebuilds the dashboard instantly. Useful when you want a current view before a planning meeting without waiting for a full run to complete.

 

Getting Started with UHC v9

1. Download UHC v9 Navigate to NetApp Console → Automation Hub → Upgrade Health Checker tileor download from NetApp Support Site.
2. Generate the Dashboard Run UHC normally — the dashboard is created automatically at runs/dashboard/index.html.
   Or run uhc --dashboard to generate from the last 30 days of existing runs, with no full run needed.
3. Configure Email Delivery Set up SMTP in UHC settings to enable automated report delivery after each run. Add your SMTP settings to config.yaml.
4. Automate on a schedule Use cron (Linux) or Task Scheduler (Windows) to run UHC regularly and keep the dashboard current without manual effort.

Supported Environments

• On-premises ONTAP 9.11.1 and later
• Scales to 100+ systems on a single VM
• Output available in HTML, Excel, and JSON

Learn More

• Upgrade Health Checker documentation
• UHC Dashboard reference
• Set up email delivery
• UHC blog on NetApp Community & UHC overview video

Questions or feedback? Reach out to: ng-uhc-productgroup@netapp.com 

We'd love to hear how you're using these new capabilities — your input shapes what we build next.