There always seems to be more work tasks to do than there is time to do them. For IT storage administrators, the way to keep your workload manageable is AUTOMATION. There is a system which lets NetApp automate the response to many of your critical system notifications. It’s not new. In fact, it has been helping NetApp customers for over 25 years, although it keeps getting better.
AutoSupport is the way NetApp storage transmits telemetry data back to NetApp which allows a lot of great functionality discussed below. This article has more detailed information, but for a quick overview you can watch this short video.
Security and privacy of the transmission and storage of AutoSupport data
Before we go further, let's discuss the elephant in the room: privacy and security of the data. Many customers have concerns, but here are the facts. There is almost no personally identifiable information (PII) contained in an AutoSupport. Contact information for support cases is an optional field. Other than that, there’s no PII unless you name aggregates, volumes, LIFs, or SVMs something like “John Smith lives at 123 Main Street”, which is NOT a best practice.
The other main concern is that the data contains customer identifiable information (CII) which could be used by hackers. AutoSupport does contain CII, but none of it relates to passwords, logins, tokens, keys, or other items which could allow access to your systems. It does contain things such as hostnames and IP addresses, but if that’s the only thing hackers had it would be hard to use any of the information at all.
However, that assumes that hackers could get the data in the first place. NetApp takes security very seriously and follows industry best practices. AutoSupport transport defaults to outbound HTTPS encrypted with TLS 1.2 and higher. HTTP transmission was deprecated a long time ago and isn’t accepted by NetApp anymore.
Once the data arrives securely, NetApp has strong procedures for encrypting it and using role-based access control to ensure only the people required to see that type of data can access it. This also includes a strong logging and auditing mechanism.
If that isn’t sufficient, there is also an option in ONTAP too ( -remove-private-data option). Please note that this makes some of the functionality highlighted below more difficult since volume, aggregate, and hostnames are stripped out.
What does your AutoSupport data enable?
The single most popular feature that sending AutoSupport data to NetApp enables is critical support case automation. This allows NetApp to detect and predict critical situations and proactively open a support case for you. In fact, 98% of critical issues are detected and opened by Active IQ before the customer is even aware something happened.
AutoSupport data also makes your support experience better. Customers who send telemetry data have their support cases resolved in half the time of other customers. It is simple to see why, because NetApp support has all the information they need at their fingertips.
AutoSupport data also powers the Active IQ Digital Advisor experience. This is a self-service website where customers can monitor and report on their entire fleet. Highlights include:
- Wellness and Health Check which detects and advises on system risks.
- Upgrade Advisor which plans step-by-step upgrades for ONTAP and E-Series.
- Cloud Recommendations advise you based on your real system data.
- Config Drift can check if your system configuration changed over time.
- Cluster Viewer can visualize your system: shelves, cabling, disks, and aggregates.
AutoSupport data can also be used to help you, your partner, and NetApp size add-ons for capacity, Tech Refresh candidates based on performance and capacity, and even consolidation efforts.
What should you do to make sure you’re sending AutoSupport data to NetApp?
There are a few simple ways.
The most reliable is to check Active IQ Digital Advisor and click on “View All Systems” and see when the “Last AutoSupport Date” is for each of your systems.
It should be in the last week. If it is in the last week, you are all set and don’t need to follow any more steps. If it isn’t, NetApp isn’t receiving your AutoSupport. That may mean your system isn’t configured to send them, or that your network is blocking their transmission.
To check your configuration in ONTAP, you can check in System Manager or on the CLI. In System Manager, click Cluster -> Settings and make sure that AutoSupport is enabled. We highly recommend HTTPS for secure transmission. For more detailed information see the documentation.
For the ONTAP CLI, see the documentation.
For either case, make sure your network team allows outbound HTTPS (port 443) to support.netapp.com .
Conclusion
Sending AutoSupport data to NetApp enables your superpowers with support case automation, reduced downtimes, a better support experience, access to many of our tools, and more.
For the best NetApp experience, enable AutoSupport today!
