This blog post focuses on Active IQ, the new services and features that come with it, and the benefits they'll bring to NetApp customers.
What’s is Active IQ?
Active IQ is the evolution of AutoSupport. It’s a cloud service that combines AutoSupport telemetry and My AutoSupport features with new predictive analytic capabilities across the NetApp Data Fabric. Using the AutoSupport information gathered from your Data Fabric assets, Active IQ provides proactive insights to improve availability, efficiency, and performance of your storage systems and help you optimise operations across your hybrid cloud.
Active IQ is available from the Tools menu on the NetApp Support site and via a mobile app.
New features of Active IQ include:
Active IQ is available from the Tools menu on the NetApp Support site and via a mobile app.
New features of Active IQ include:
- Customizable, responsive dashboard
- Capacity trending and forecasting that lets you know when you need more storage
- One-click lookup for your systems, sites, groups, and clusters
- Workload tagging
- Improved visibility for case tracking and trending
What’s the big deal about Active IQ?
Active IQ offers a set of advanced data services that deliver analytics, insights, and advisories based on community wisdom from NetApp's massive user base over the last 20 years.
AutoSupport telemetry feeds data into Active IQ from all these Data Fabric endpoints: AltaVault, FlexPod, SolidFire, NetApp HCI, FAS, AFF, ONTAP Cloud, ONTAP Select, E-Series, and StorageGRID—so pretty much all NetApp products are covered. It also feeds information from other data fabric assets such as OnCommand.
Active IQ leverages machine learning to teach the telemetry system new patterns, so it’s continually learning and adapting to your evolving environments.
As Active IQ is a cloud-based service, you'll be able to keep on top on the health and efficiency of your systems anywhere, anytime, from any device.
Using information from your systems, Active IQ can:
AutoSupport telemetry feeds data into Active IQ from all these Data Fabric endpoints: AltaVault, FlexPod, SolidFire, NetApp HCI, FAS, AFF, ONTAP Cloud, ONTAP Select, E-Series, and StorageGRID—so pretty much all NetApp products are covered. It also feeds information from other data fabric assets such as OnCommand.
Active IQ leverages machine learning to teach the telemetry system new patterns, so it’s continually learning and adapting to your evolving environments.
As Active IQ is a cloud-based service, you'll be able to keep on top on the health and efficiency of your systems anywhere, anytime, from any device.
Using information from your systems, Active IQ can:
- Recommend upgrades for ONTAP systems and provide upgrade plans
- Proactively identify system risks related to configuration issues or known bugs
- Provide configuration, capacity, efficiency, and performance views and reports for better management of your NetApp systems
- Predict storage growth to identify capacity addition needs
Note: You'll need to enable AutoSupport on your storage systems to receive the benefits of Active IQ.
New and Improved Discovery Dashboard
The Active IQ customer dashboard has been improved to provide a customisable and more responsive experience.
Updates Include:
Updates Include:
- Product Portfolio Inventory
- One-click capacity and contract renewal
- New storage efficiency recommendations
- Performance hot spots
- Health Summary and trends
- Storage Efficiency and Risk Advisory services
- Upgrade recommendations
- Link to guided problem solving and chat (Integrated with Elio with IBM Watson™)
- Summary of cases
- Performance hot spot - Coming soon
Even the mobile app got a facelift
The new Active IQ Mobile App replaces the AutoSupport app and is available for both iOS and Android, and if you've already installed it, it's likely that it's already updated itself, so you wont have to download it again.
Some new features of note are the ability to:
You can also quickly locate systems through recent searches and add favourites.
The app is still very much a work in progress and I found some areas, such as chat, would take you to the mysupport website.
Some new features of note are the ability to:
- Engage with NetApp in a click for:
- Capacity additions
- Renewals
- Mobile Chat (Powered by Watson)
- Email for mobile app support
- View installed base and system details
- Sites, clusters, systems
- AutoSupport and top sections
- View proactive recommendations
- Storage efficiency
- Performance
- ONTAP upgrades
- System Risks
- Digital support content and capabilities
- View and updates case notes
- Guided problem solving
You can also quickly locate systems through recent searches and add favourites.
The app is still very much a work in progress and I found some areas, such as chat, would take you to the mysupport website.
New Advisors
As well as these new improvements, some new advisors will also be added to the Support Site and will be accessible through the Active IQ Dashboard.
These Advisors include:
Risk Advisor
The new risk advisor benefits from the proven goodness already attained by the installed base and will give you recommendations based on community wisdom. Furthermore, your risk mitigation will help to improve the confidence of those recommendations over time.
These Advisors include:
Risk Advisor
The new risk advisor benefits from the proven goodness already attained by the installed base and will give you recommendations based on community wisdom. Furthermore, your risk mitigation will help to improve the confidence of those recommendations over time.
Benefits of using the new Risk Advisor include:
- Better system availability by lowering risk profile
- Reduce planning time for upgrades - you know which systems will benefit from upgrade from a single report
- Additional benefit of newer features in ONTAP 9
Interop Advisor
The Interop Advisor provides automated interop assessments in the NetApp Support cloud. It advises ecosystem upgrades (Switch and hosts) by comparing OneCollect (see below) diagnostics against Interoperability Matrix Tool compliance. Interop Advisor consumes OneCollect AutoSupports and reports on current configuration, identifies incompatibilities and recommends supported configurations.
The Interop Advisor provides automated interop assessments in the NetApp Support cloud. It advises ecosystem upgrades (Switch and hosts) by comparing OneCollect (see below) diagnostics against Interoperability Matrix Tool compliance. Interop Advisor consumes OneCollect AutoSupports and reports on current configuration, identifies incompatibilities and recommends supported configurations.
Storage Efficiency Advisor
The Storage Efficiency Advisor compares AFF Storage efficiency against similar systems in NetApp's installed base (based on age, platform, ONTAP version, workload, etc) and recommends improvements. The comparison is done at system level and suggests way of getting better efficiency out of your systems. You'll also be able to share you success and experience with your peers.
The Storage Efficiency Advisor compares AFF Storage efficiency against similar systems in NetApp's installed base (based on age, platform, ONTAP version, workload, etc) and recommends improvements. The comparison is done at system level and suggests way of getting better efficiency out of your systems. You'll also be able to share you success and experience with your peers.
OneCollect
OneCollect, which replaces nSanity, is NetApp's new data collection tool. OneCollect is an integral part of NetApp's upgrade, migration, health check and case troubleshooting tooling, and consolidates several tools into one simple to use tool. OneCollect will collect information about storage, hosts and fabrics in your environment and produce a detailed report. It also provides a detailed view of your data and performs an IMT Compatibility check. |
OneCollect offers some much needed improvements over nSanity, including:
Note: Some features may be beta release at the time of writing.
OneCollect is designed to be the new data collection standard for all NetApp solutions, so additional features will be added over time, including:
- Command Set updates - used for storage, host OS and switches
- Additional log collection from 7-mode, ONTAP, Windows, Linux and E-Series devices
- Support collection from other storage controllers, including Isilon Controllers
- Advanced viewer for storage, host and FC switch data collection
- Performs IMT checks and displays the results and recommendations
- Ability to import and view OneCollect output files collected on another system and upload it to AutoSupport DWH
Note: Some features may be beta release at the time of writing.
OneCollect is designed to be the new data collection standard for all NetApp solutions, so additional features will be added over time, including:
- SnapCenter data and log collection
- Host Performance data collection
- Application (Oracle, Exchange, SQL) data collection
- HCI solution, StorageGRID, AltaVault and NSLM data collection
- Support collection from other new storage, host OS and switches
Elio With Watson
Watson is a question answering computer system developed by IBM. Using cognitive computing, Watson is capable of answering questions posed in natural language.
Watson was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!, and in 2011 it competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first place prize of $1 million.
NetApp has clearly seen the potential of Watson to help transform it's digital support and dramatically cut the time to solve customer issues through Elio. With this in mind, NetApp hopes to solve problems four times faster than traditional methods through omni-channel support, where you'll be able to access Elio anywhere, anytime and on any device.
Watson was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!, and in 2011 it competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first place prize of $1 million.
NetApp has clearly seen the potential of Watson to help transform it's digital support and dramatically cut the time to solve customer issues through Elio. With this in mind, NetApp hopes to solve problems four times faster than traditional methods through omni-channel support, where you'll be able to access Elio anywhere, anytime and on any device.
Elio is trained on language and words from questions that customers have previously asked over many years of anonymized resolved cases. Questions and problems are grouped into categories, and mapped to intents, products and features, to give the best possible answer. When you start a technical support chat or create a case, Elio is the first responder. If Elio cannot solve the problem, then he transfers the chat into Live Chat with the right TSE.
Elio will be in English only at release, but plans are in place for multi-language in the future.
Elio will be in English only at release, but plans are in place for multi-language in the future.