NetApp OnCommand Insight is a pretty good tool, and the only concern I have with it is the price. Its price is quite high and could be improved because the licensing feature of this particular tool is on a per GB basis instead of the price being for the complete tool itself. The more you discover, the more you need to pay, and this makes NetApp OnCommand Insight more costly when compared to other tools which are available in the market.

My company doesn't have a cloud environment, so all storage is on-premises. I'm not aware of the integration of NetApp OnCommand Insight with the cloud environment, but the tool fits all the marks in terms of what I require and need. It checks all columns for me, so at the moment, nothing comes to mind in terms of additional features I'd like to see from the tool in the future.

We would like to see some kind of email mechanism to send email alerts with system updates. Also, perhaps OCI could send a graph that gives yearly or quarterly reports.

Setup could be easier with some more integration with other products, but that's not really a NetApp thing. That's really the other products and how they integrate back with NetApp.

Most of it is not them, it is how they communicate with other third parties. It is just the third parties, trying to get all the pieces to talk together correctly.

Maybe a little bit more graphical interface. Right now - and this is going to sound really weird - but whatever the biggest server is, the one that is utilizing the most storage space, instead of showing me that server and how much storage space, it just shows it to you in a big font. Literally in a big font. That's it. So if your server is named Max and you've got another server named Sue, and Max is taking up most of your space, all it's going to show is just Max is big, Sue is little. That's is really weird, because I really want to see more than that. You can click on Max, drill down in and see the stuff. But I would rather, on my front interface, say, "Oh, gosh, Max is using 10 terabytes. Sue is only using one. She's fixing to choke. Let me move some of this over."

You can build those out, but initially when you bring up the dashboard, that was one thing they couldn't take away. They couldn't change that. It just looks kind of kludgy. I'd like it to look a lot more clean when I first login.

It would help if it could be a little more user friendly at the beginning. Show me a little bit more that I need to see, that I find more relevant, without me having to build out templates. Maybe even have a drop-down that says you've already got the data there. But it would be a lot easier if I could just build the template out myself and, right now, I don't feel like we're comfortable doing that. We had to bring somebody in to do it.

I would like to see more performance features on the flash storage and also on the backup appliances.

Also the ability to analyze NAS, NFS and CIFS protocols and cloud protocols.

We would like to see additional online training.

I think there was an issue with the actual usage of some of the storage, so that could be a little bit more detail we can get in to.

Also helpful would be cloud integration or even assessment in going towards, "Will this footprint be viable to move to the cloud?" That's an option we are thinking would help.

It has a lot already. But if they would just continue the platform support for other vendors besides NetApp on the OCI part. Just to get more of our storage vendors involved.

The UI is friendly. But I think we'd like to see more graphics on it, more graphical reports for management and the like, so we don't have to actually put stuff together. Anything we can pre-generate or that is canned is a lot better.

Like I said, we're still learning about it. I don't know if there are any features that they can improve right now that I know about.

We would like to see the ability to produce more complex reports without having to go to Professional Services.

Right now it monitors our entire datacenter, all the different Pure Storage as well as NetApp. It does multiple vendors. Its only drawbacks are it's expensive and the upgrades are somewhat difficult.

It would be better if they could simplify the upgrade process. It's long and tedious. You have to be careful, or you could shoot yourself in the foot.

I think there's still a piece of it that's external, the Java interface. I think that's all starting to get integrated into the whole HTML5, and once it's all integrated together, I think that's probably going to be better. I'm looking forward to that.

I think one of the weaknesses is pulling in systems outside of virtual environments, of physical hosts, and the like. I think it's something they're working on from what I've heard. But being able to look at some other things outside of what we typically monitor - we have some physical AIX environments. They can look into it a little bit but there's more that I can see being done in some of those outside-systems for virtualization. For virtualization and NetApp it's great, but for pulling in other sources where we're using NetApp storage, we're looking to get a little bit more data out of it.

It's the interop matrix. And if there was a chance to orchestrate on a heterogeneous structure using OCI, that would be a great start; or at least a plugin to each one of them, that would be a great start too.

Also, right now we don't have any management functionality using OCI. It's all about monitoring.

We have floor automation but I don't think we can include heterogeneous components into that. If there was a solution or plugin on OCI which could give us that functionality, where we could manage heterogeneous data sources, that would be great.

The ability to better manage the graphs and the dashboards: Resizing them, positioning them, and the ability to publish them outside of OCI to websites or SharePoint.

Sold differently, the user interface (UI) would be easier. At times, it seems a little bit slow. We find when it draws data that there is a lag.

The reporting tool is very cumbersome, and it is difficult to create reports out of it. That is the most complicated part of the tool and how to use it.

OnCommand Insight is really limited compared to what Cloud Insights is doing. It lacks AI to protect against ransomware and identify users accessing things abnormally.

It would be helpful if it were easier to create queries. It's not very intuitive.

They've already got better stuff coming out. I don't know what else I could need, honestly. Before, they had the fiber channel for switches on there; I think they are already coming out with ethernet, the other boards. That was what I wanted and they're already working on it.

One thing they could improve is making the data warehouse side easier to use.

Alerting: It's not complicated, but with so many groups involved in setting up something like an SNMP trap, or even an email alerting system, so many different groups have to get involved. If there was a simpler way to do that, to bypass a lot of that bureaucracy, that would be helpful. Then, just to make it even easier for management to have their own dashboards, possibly customize it.

Enhance SNMP monitoring in order to broaden the number of storages that can be discovered. Review the setup of the software and divide the DB from the application and web server. Also, modularize the software more.

The UI: They have been growing and changing. There's been some growing pains with that, but they are moving into the new HTML5 interface, which is fantastic. They are hitting on all the right points, but it's never going to be a perfect because there's always going to be something new, which means there's always going to be something that has to be improved.

I would like them to change the licensing model. It costs too much.

It goes on raw instead of going on usable storage. It doesn't necessarily have a value when you deploy, for example, a 400TB storage and I'm only using 60GB out of it at the beginning. Then, I have to pay for the entire 400TB, which is very costly, instead of having a growing up session.

Personally, some of the older things that HPE created originally, you could dig a little bit deeper into each client in certain ways that OCI doesn't quite do.

With HPE we could look at very specific port-to-port on there, per array that we have. Whereas the OCI, you can still do that but the way it's done is a little bit... When I look at a host, I can't look at the entire host. I can only look at different LUNS on that host and that can be a problem sometimes.

• Email notifications
• Data store recoveries
• Moving into the cloud.

They should include more of these type of things.

There was a minor issue where we were receiving a notification that a cluster was not available, or communication to the cluster. OnCommand Manager could not reach a cluster, which is really much like a false positive. The minor issues were communications within the systems.

Any increase in loading times, or anything like that, would be useful for us. It's slow, the user interface could be improved a little bit. You have to click through a lot of things in order to be able to find what you want. Also, the dashboards aren't very user-friendly.

We have traditionally been customers of NetApp, we have it all over the enterprise. So far it is satisfactory. But I would like to see NetApp focus more on availability and customer support. From 7-Mode to C mode a migration happened and many features, like FTP and SFTP, were dropped. We have been using it, but there needs to be better communication when features are dropped because there are end users using it who might find it a shock: "Oh, why was that dropped?"

We're not using it to its full potential, so it is hard to provide feedback here.

I would like them to develop voice commands so that I can say to the product, "Create a volume."

I would like to see better graphics. We have seen regular graphs and pie graphs. I am sure that there are better ways to show this information. The graphical settings should also be easier to use.

Just make it one product, not in pieces like performance and discovery. Stop having all these individual pieces. Pricing by terabytes, not the end of the world, and that's okay. Stop if I want this, I have to buy that. Just release it as a single product.

Just more features, to be able to dig a little bit deeper into what it can actually report on.

It's really fragile. We try not to depend on it because every time we change something in our environment, it breaks. So reporting, performance, metrics, it takes a lot to keep this thing running. We have a really dynamic environment, meaning our machines are constantly being patched. They are constantly being rebooted, and OCI is not really that resilient.

I'd like it to be more stable, simpler, and get Java out of it.

They're moving away from the Java interface, but there are still some things that are only in the Java versus the web interface.

The product is not easy to learn from the materials provided. We still have questions regarding it.

We can't encompass everything into it yet. E.g., the plugins for the other vendors' products that we can't currently monitor.

I don't know, the product is very good. Maybe lower the price.

Perhaps integration with other platforms; any other monitoring, other kinds of storage platforms.