Cloud-based overhaul for on-demand telemetry data collection

Web-based, microservices-based application architectures are playing a major role for IT teams that are supporting enterprise applications today, especially NetApp IT business app developers.

Using their DevOps framework, the IT team set out to build cloud-native apps using microservices architectures running in containers. They started by rebuilding NetApp’s award-winning Support site,  the main channel for NetApp customers who need help and information. The site logs more than 350,000 unique visitors per month. The team then tackled a new case management system for hundreds of technical support engineers who troubleshoot 15,000 customer cases each month.

The next challenge was akin to the story of the cobbler’s children who had no shoes.  The team needed to address a very real problem for the NetApp IT organization itself: a transaction-heavy back-end app that enables the submission and tracking of on-demand requests for specific diagnostic NetApp® AutoSupport® messages. AutoSupport OnDemand had become unreliable, required frequent restarts, and was past due for an extensive upgrade—a major pain for IT operations and application support.

AutoSupport is a telemetry mechanism that proactively monitors the health of NetApp installed systems and automatically sends configuration, status, performance, and system events data to NetApp.

At the same time, the technical support engineers who relied on AutoSupport OnDemand data were frustrated with the application’s poor response time and unreliability. The application

was hindering their ability to quickly troubleshoot issues, provide diagnostic advice, and perform routine health checks for customers.

The solution

• Transfer from file server to AutoSupport OnDemand
• History processing
• History scheduler
• Email notification
• REST services (for consumption by other applications)
• API gateway
• Failure processing