Datasheet
OnCommand Insight Perform
End-to-end performance for NetApp and multivendor
storage environments
KEY BENEFITS
• Improve resource utilization
while avoiding negative
performance impacts.
• Quickly identify and correct
performance problems and
bottlenecks.
• Understand performance
trends and take action—add
resources or rebalance load—
before bottlenecks occur.
• Validate and optimize storage
tiering and service levels.
• Choose the best resources for
new applications.
• Monitor NetApp® FAS (clustered
Data ONTAP® and Data ONTAP
operating in 7-Mode), E-Series,
V-Series, and FlexArray, and
other major vendor storage
platforms.
The Challenge
Avoid bottlenecks and troubleshoot
application performance problems as
quickly as possible
The move to advanced virtualization
and the cloud makes performance
more important than ever. Optimizing
performance is the key to unlocking
the potential that lies latent in your
infrastructure. You have to be able to
avoid bottlenecks, quickly troubleshoot
performance problems, and tune your
environment to achieve maximum
performance and meet service-level
objectives. Otherwise, utilization suffers,
driving up management costs and forcing
you to overinvest in capital assets.
The Solution
Optimize performance for
maximum return
NetApp OnCommand® Insight Perform
is the answer. As part of the NetApp
OnCommand Insight suite that helps
you manage storage as an end-toend service and integrate storage into
your entire IT service-delivery chain,
Insight Perform provides a breadth of
performance information and facilitates
troubleshooting and optimization.
OnCommand Insight Perform helps you
improve performance, from your virtual
machine environment, through your
storage network, and down to your
disks. It gathers near-real-time VM,
fabric, and storage performance data
from your environment; maps it
to applications, hosts, and service
paths; and correlates that data. It lets
you proactively perform load balancing
on your VMs, servers, storage, compute,
and SAN switch infrastructure to avoid
congestion or contention. When workloads are balanced, you can safely
increase resource utilization without
risking application brownouts and
unplanned outages. You can also
maximize the ROI of your existing
storage assets, deferring capital
expenditures.
“If your organization is looking for
a way to easily manage operations,
cost, and service quality, ESG Lab
recommends the latest version of
NetApp OnCommand Insight, a
lightweight management platform
with real-time, big data analytics for
dynamically changing, heterogeneous
storage environments.”
Source: ESG Lab Review, NetApp
OnCommand Insight 7, June 2014
Figure 1) The patent-pending correlation engine of OnCommand Insight Perform identifies data
sources related to performance issues, so you can overlay workloads for further analysis.
With the following key OnCommand
Insight Perform capabilities, you can:
• Improve VM, server, array, switch,
and fabric utilization without
compromising performance
• Detect multipath configuration errors
through traffic analysis
• Identify the best VM, host, array, and
switch resources to allocate to a new
application
• Monitor storage response time and
correlate it with individual application
performance
• Optimize storage allocation to
accelerate application performance
• Validate tiering allocations and
verify that all datasets are on the
optimal tier
Improve Utilization Without
Compromising Performance
In most IT environments, some or all
resources may be overprovisioned
as a hedge against performance bottlenecks. To avoid problems, administrators
often hesitate to push utilization above
relatively modest limits. That is because
of the difficulty of simultaneously
monitoring performance on servers,
networks, and storage, and of identifying
and correcting performance problems.
Insight Perform changes all of that by
allowing you to raise utilization across
your IT infrastructure without fear of
hampering application performance.
The Perform module monitors performance across your entire environment
without the need for cumbersome
agent installation. It maintains service
performance information to help you
analyze storage virtualization efficiency,
improve load balancing, and improve
resource utilization to optimize services.
In addition to monitoring storage and
storage network devices, Insight Perform
can help you monitor applications, hosts,
and VMs and understand daily patterns
that may transiently affect performance.
You can view an application’s actual
utilization metrics across your storage
assets to optimize application
performance.
OnCommand Insight Perform also
lets you set and manage thresholds
to establish well-defined performance
policies. When policies are violated,
alerts are posted so that adjustments
can be made. You can proactively
monitor performance data to identify
performance trends and spot changes
that might result in policy violations.
Quickly Troubleshoot Difficult
Performance Issues
When a performance problem does
arise, Insight Perform makes it significantly easier to identify and correct it.
You can quickly analyze key metrics
such as CPU, memory, and I/O load
for both servers and VMs; identify
congested hosts and storage network
ports; examine application I/O performance; and determine whether one
application is having a performance
impact on another.
Insight Perform includes unique features
for analyzing virtual environments.
The patent-pending correlation engine
identifies data sources related to performance issues, so you can overlay the
workloads for further analysis. If a VM
is running slowly, you can see whether
it is the result of a trend over time or
just a spike. You can also see whether
underlying datastores are overloaded,
analyze contention between VMs, and
quickly determine whether a particular
VM is bogging down server performance.
Insight Perform works with and enhances
your IT team’s expertise and intuition.
With all your performance data in one
Figure 2) OnCommand Insight Perform lets you view node performance by tier to validate
that you have made optimal decisions when deploying new applications.
place, you can identify and correct
traffic-flow problems, get optimal
performance from all your resources,
and reduce or eliminate expensive
slowdowns and outages.
Maximize the Benefits of Tiering
You probably have multiple tiers of
storage: high-performance (and highcost) storage for your business-critical
applications, mid-performance storage
for less critical applications, and so on.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know whether the
datasets you have on various tiers are
actually well matched to the capabilities
of the storage?
OnCommand Insight Perform makes it
simple to map each application to the
storage volumes it uses and to view and
understand the I/O activity of those
volumes. You can quickly identify
datasets that are sitting relatively idle
on expensive storage and make adjustments as appropriate, reducing the
rate of storage growth in your most
expensive tiers. Because you are able
to closely match your applications
with the appropriate level of storage
performance, service levels improve.
Choose the Best Resources
for New Applications
Provisioning a new application can be
a time-consuming process. You have
to identify resources that can physically
accommodate the new application and
that have the necessary performance
margin to avoid bottlenecks. Once
again, Insight Perform simplifies the
task by giving you all the information
you need in one place. You can quickly
identify the best hosts, network paths,
and storage to meet the projected
requirements of new applications.
Get Support for NetApp Platforms
OnCommand Insight Perform offers
a holistic view and analysis of NetApp
FAS, E-Series, V-Series, and FlexArray.
It complements other NetApp software
products, such as OnCommand
Performance Manager and SANtricity®
Storage Manager.
Deploy the OnCommand Insight
Modules You Need
OnCommand Insight is composed of
four modules (Table 1). You can start
with the Perform and Discover modules
for performance analysis and inventory
identification, respectively, and then
add on from there. Discover is the
required base module that identifies
your entire inventory and enables
integration of all the modules. Perform,
Assure, and Plan modules are sold
independently, so you can purchase
based on your needs.
Learn More About
OnCommand Insight
Go to www.netapp.com/
oncommandinsight to find out
more about the OnCommand
Insight integrated product suite,
including Insight Perform.
About NetApp
Leading organizations worldwide
count on NetApp for software, systems
and services to manage and store their
data. Customers value our teamwork,
expertise and passion for helping them
succeed now and into the future.
www.netapp.com
ONCOMMAND INSIGHT­—
AGENTLESS, MULTIVENDOR, MULTIPROTOCOL
PERFORM
ASSURE
PLAN
Performance Monitoring and Analytics
Application to storage disk monitoring, threshold alerting, and root-cause analysis
(VM, ESX, datastore, volume, and disk performance)
•
Ability to predict and alert on performance issues
•
Change, Configuration, and Compliance Management
Ability to discover, model, monitor, track, and validate configuration-related changes,
including proactive change modeling
•
Ability to create policies that automatically monitor for IT compliance with regulations,
governance, and industry best practices
•
Storage service catalog for tiered storage
•
Capacity Management
Capacity consumption, trending, forecasting, and efficiency
•
Showback/chargeback, cost analysis
•
Storage reclamation and reallocation
•
Canned and custom reporting (role-based tier management; business level by tenant,
business unit, project, application, etc.)
•
Discover – A single platform that automatically inventories your environment and integrates the modules
Table 1) OnCommand Insight is composed of four modules.
Start with the Discover module and add on from there. Perform, Assure, and Plan are sold independently, so you can purchase based on your needs.
© 2014 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document
may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc.
Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the
NetApp logo, Data ONTAP, OnCommand, and SANtricity are trademarks
or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/
or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or
registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be
treated as such. DS-3226-0814
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