Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud Insights, you can ask NetApp to help you build the reports from the ground up. The dashboards are intuitive, but finding the report you want is sometimes a challenge. If you don't have the report already loaded, pulling it in and letting it build its data can be cumbersome. 

That was a nuisance for the virtualization group. Also, it can be hard to express the value to these other groups. We already have tools that do this, but we don't have access to them, and they don't want to give it to us.  We just want this resolved quickly, but selling them on value was difficult to do. Some groups immediately saw the value and abandoned other tools, whereas others have been like, "We've used these tools for 15 years. They work great for us. Why can't you get on board?"  It's difficult when you're coming up with a brand new tool against entrenched people who don't care to try something else. Those are two of our big primary technologies with them.

It's easy to sell storage people on intuitive reporting. Before we moved to NetApp, reporting off of the storage was a nightmare. SMIS was a terrible protocol, and it should have died decades ago. We're ready to use new reporting tools, but our virtualization people have used these tools since VMware was invented. 

Cloud Insights could offer more detail when we drill down into the Azure environment.

One of the features that OCI had, which I liked, was called anomaly detection. It holistically examined metrics across an application, identifying deviations from the baseline. A classic example is if an application had a CPU spike every Friday at 5 PM for 30 minutes, anomaly detection would learn that pattern. 

If one Friday at 5 PM there's no CPU spike, it would flag it as potentially problematic. Cloud Insights currently lacks this feature, and I would like to see it reintroduced.

Their pricing model needs improvement. 

The visualization needs some improvement because there are occasional delays while the system queries information.  

There is room for improving the creating and managing or modifying of reports. That is still a difficult task to do and requires knowledge beyond the storage itself. I would love to see reporting improved so that we can create reports by dragging and dropping pieces into a report form and publish a report that way. We do get by with it, but typically it requires engagement with NetApp to get us the reports that we need.

Most of the time, I initially connect with entry-level support, and then I need to request a higher-tier support level, which can result in delays.

As I went through learning the querying, it could have been a little more intuitive. I'm still fresh into the system.

In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial. Getting that, out-of-the-box, would be helpful.

There is training that has been provided. I just haven't gone through all of it yet.

In our area, many customers cannot afford the solution. The solution’s price is an issue.

The IP-based monitoring could be added in a future release.

There are some very specific things for improvement in the Cloud Secure product. I have already given this feedback to the product managers regarding this area. 

The first level of NetApp's technical support could be improved.