NetApp® Active IQ® is a digital advisor that simplifies the proactive care and optimization of NetApp storage. It provides visibility into the health of all the systems in your Data Fabric and uses AIOps to uncover actions that will improve availability, security, and performance.
Active IQ has been providing tremendous value to ONTAP® customers for years, but what’s often overlooked is the value it provides to other products in the portfolio, such as our StorageGRID® solution. We’ve added a lot of new features of late, so let’s take a look at how Active IQ is helping our StorageGRID customers avoid disruptions and improve system health.
It all starts with data
For Active IQ to work its magic, it needs data. The more data the better. Each day, Active IQ receives AutoSupport® telemetry data from thousands of StorageGRID systems around the globe. Data that fuels Active IQ’s predictive analytics and community wisdom and makes all the features in this blog possible.
In order for you to get the most out of Active IQ, you need to make sure AutoSupport is enabled on your StorageGRID system. Active IQ needs this configuration, status, performance, and events data to derive insights and recommendations specific to your systems. Please refer to the documentation on how to configure AutoSupport if you haven’t already done so.
Get a better view
One of the biggest enhancements is visibility. It starts on the primary Active IQ dashboard, where the inventory widget shows you how many StorageGRID systems you have in your data fabric, the percentage of your install base they make up, and how many sites they resided in.
From there you can dive deeper to see various details of your StorageGRID footprint, such as serial numbers, software versions, support dates, and more importantly, bring up a dashboard for your GRID.
The dashboard is where you get a quick overview of system health, any actions needed, and some visibility into things you might want to plan for. Let’s take a closer look at wellness, planning, and the new GRID viewer.
Check in on system health
ONTAP customers are very familiar with the wellness area of Active IQ, and it works the same for StorageGRID solutions. Active IQ uses predictive analytics and known risk factors to uncover potential issues, and then provides guidance on how to correct the issue before it becomes a problem. Those actions are reflected in the wellness cards.
Clicking on a wellness card shows the action needed for that category. In this case, an OS Upgrade is needed to eliminate a critical risk impacting availability & protection. The other tabs will show you the unique risks this action will eliminate, as well as affected systems. Active IQ will also link you to the specific Knowledge Base article with details on the risk and solution.
Plan ahead
The planning widget lets you know when additional capacity may soon be needed, or license renewals are coming up. Clicking on the capacity planning card shows sites that are over 70% capacity today (high risk warning) or will over the next few months (low risk warning).
See your GRID
The GRID Viewer is an exciting new feature in Active IQ. Here you can see licensed capacity, installed nodes, node per site, and the support term for your StorageGRID environment.
The capacity details tab shows installed capacity, used capacity, and available capacity at the GRID and site level.
Lower your storage costs
One of the exciting features of ONTAP is FabricPool, which automatically tiers inactive data from high-performance flash to lower-cost object storage such as StorageGRID. FabricPool is transparent to applications and allows enterprises to lower their overall storage costs without sacrificing performance or having to rearchitect solutions.
Active IQ can identify inactive data that can be automatically tiered from flash to StorageGRID using FabricPool technology.
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Get started today
Active IQ is available to all NetApp customers who have an active support contract (features vary by product and support tier). If you already have a single sign-on, you can log in and get started now. Or to learn more, visit the Active IQ product page.