Ditch custom solutions for better results

When it comes to modern IT infrastructure, complexity is the enemy. The growing sprawl of data across hybrid multicloud environments, evolving workloads like AI, and disparate storage solutions have made monitoring and troubleshooting extremely difficult. For many organizations, the question isn’t just how to manage today’s tangled IT ecosystems, but also whether to build or to buy the tools necessary to do it effectively.  

NetApp offers a unified infrastructure monitoring and observability solution that cuts through complexity and provides industry-leading visibility across your data environment. NetApp® Data Infrastructure Insights doesn’t just optimize ITOps; it eliminates the heavy lifting of maintaining homegrown systems. With Data Infrastructure Insights, your storage and infrastructure teams can refocus their efforts on what really matters.

Many IT teams have tried to meet rising complexity by creating custom tools with scripts and open-source platforms like Grafana to fill visibility gaps. Although this approach can meet a team’s needs and seem cost-effective at first, it quickly becomes a complex and resource-heavy endeavor. Enterprise Strategy Group research reveals that many teams deploy more than 10 observability tools that are designed for dedicated infrastructure components from different vendors. These tools are effective for individual components, but they fail to provide comprehensive insight into the overall IT environment. 

Custom-built solutions are usually an effort to bridge this gap, but to become a dependable and scalable solution, they require a significant amount of time to design, to test, and to deploy. And after they have been implemented, they demand continual updates and manual oversight to keep pace with evolving technologies and expanding data environments. Tasks like adding support for new cloud providers or diagnosing performance issues become time-consuming and detract from your team’s ability to focus on strategic business priorities. And you can’t turn to the software vendor for help. It’s all on your team. 

This ongoing burden is one reason why companies like DreamWorks have turned to Data Infrastructure Insights. Scott Miller, technology fellow at DreamWorks Animation, explains the challenge of managing homegrown systems:  

“Data Infrastructure Insights replaced our previous setup with open-source solutions because we didn’t want to be in the business of maintaining those tools. Before Data Infrastructure Insights, I relied on system managers, command lines, or dashboards, which never quite had what I needed. Now I get a clear, one-shot picture of what’s happening. Data Infrastructure Insights dashboards have been incredibly helpful at providing insights. Since Data Infrastructure Insights has a dedicated team keeping it current and fixing bugs, it made sense to delegate that so our team could focus on solving DreamWorks-specific problems.” 

With Data Infrastructure Insights, DreamWorks gained not just a tool, but a team that’s dedicated to keeping the solution efficient, scalable, and up to date. This support has allowed the studio to reallocate time and resources toward higher-value activities.  

What sets Data Infrastructure Insights apart is its ability to provide end-to-end visibility across your entire IT ecosystem. Businesses today operate in diverse environments, with workloads spread across on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and increasingly containerized applications. Without the centralized view of infrastructure monitoring that Data Infrastructure Insights provides, troubleshooting any performance issues and managing your capacity become monumental tasks.  

Data Infrastructure Insights simplifies those tasks through: 

• Cross-platform integration. Whether it’s AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, or VMware, Data Infrastructure Insights integrates seamlessly with major cloud providers and third-party storage platforms like from Dell, Pure, and IBM. This creates a unified, standardized perspective across all your resources.  
• Dynamic, real-time dashboards. You can use the visually intuitive dashboards right out of the box or highly customize them. These dashboards highlight critical metrics, such as your organization’s storage utilization, network performance, and application efficiency, to enable faster decision-making.  
• Comprehensive correlation analysis. Data Infrastructure Insights takes the web of interconnected components within your IT environment and traces the relationships between metrics. This granular insight accelerates root cause identification so that your teams can reduce risk and resolve issues before they snowball. 

When systems go down or performance lags, the cost of downtime can be astronomical. Troubleshooting with custom-built monitoring solutions often involves sifting through logs, juggling multiple data sources, and conducting trial-and-error investigations. Not only is this approach time-consuming, but it also increases the mean time to resolution (MTTR).  

Data Infrastructure Insights completely redefines this process. By using machine learning–powered anomaly detection, Data Infrastructure Insights identifies deviations from normal performance baseline behaviors. When something goes wrong, your IT team receives alerts with actionable insights and clear details, so team members don’t have to dig for the cause.  

One of the biggest misconceptions among organizations is that building an observability solution in-house is cheaper than buying an out-of-the-box solution. Although the cost of development may initially seem manageable, total ownership costs quickly add up. Custom solutions often mean: 

• Significant investment in hiring or training specialized talent 
• Ongoing maintenance to ensure compatibility with evolving IT stacks 
• Lost productivity as internal teams focus on troubleshooting the tools instead of solving core business problems 

Beyond the financial cost is the lost-opportunity cost. Your IT team’s talent is better used working on strategic initiatives, not maintaining scripts or updating dashboards. 

Because Data Infrastructure Insights is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based solution, it eliminates maintenance overhead and supports effortless scalability. Your IT team no longer needs to worry about system upkeep or resource limitations that they experience with homegrown solutions. With the flexibility to seamlessly integrate both existing and new infrastructure components, Data Infrastructure Insights provides consistent monitoring across all your resources, no matter how complex your IT environment becomes.  

With NetApp, you have a trusted partner supporting your infrastructure monitoring and observability needs. Your team is supported with routine updates, bug fixes, and a solution that adapts to your IT environment. Unlike homegrown solutions, Data Infrastructure Insights is constantly improving. Your team benefits through its continual innovation with new features and through the tailored dashboards that are added regularly. 

If your organization is grappling with the visibility challenges brought on by the growing complexity of IT infrastructure, Data Infrastructure Insights provides a transformative solution. By using advanced technology to achieve seamless integration across environments, Data Infrastructure Insights helps your team simplify management and gain insights that custom-built tools just can’t match.  

But don’t just take our word for it. Download the Enterprise Strategy Group Showcase for a detailed look at the challenges that organizations like yours face today and find out how Data Infrastructure Insights can help solve them.