Better together: VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Much like my garage, IT organizations have many different tools, some of which are rarely (if ever) used. My 1/2-inch ratchet set sees action on nearly every one of my projects, but the ball joint press was used once and has been collecting dust ever since. The saying “use the right tool for the job” holds true in general, but sometimes you have to make due with what you have. There’s certainly a case to be made for consolidation of IT management tools, but the first priority should be to avoid leaving critical gaps. 

Over the years, IT observability has become a crowded market, and it is difficult to find an organization of reasonable size that doesn’t already employ multiple products. Some platforms compete by becoming like a Swiss Army knife and by checking as many boxes (and by replacing as many other tools) as possible. Others find a niche and focus on doing something that nobody else does. The result is a sort of observability Venn diagram of unique and overlapping capabilities.

NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights delivers broad heterogeneous support across all of its core use cases and provides a storage-focused perspective that offers many unique capabilities not found in competitive products. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations (formerly VMware Aria Operations) suite is similar in that regard. It is also an observability platform with multivendor support, but it’s distinctly VMware focused.

Data Infrastructure Insights and VCF Operations both provide extensive capabilities in general observability, capacity planning, third-party integrations, customization, and troubleshooting, with a comprehensive library of out-of-the-box dashboards and reports. At a high level, we could describe VCF Operations as a VMware observability platform with some storage capability, and, conversely, Data Infrastructure Insights offers a storage-focused approach with VMware observability. While they provide some of the same data in a different context, each platform offers a unique perspective that caters specifically to the VMware and storage operations teams, respectively.

What is today known as VCF Operations has a long history and has grown into a suite of products through a combination of development and acquisition. Along with its many supporting companion products, it has undergone several revamps and rebrandings, from vCenter Operations (vCOps), to vRealize Operations (vROps), to Aria Operations, and finally to VMware Cloud Foundation Operations. Due to VMware’s dominance in the market, as well as the robust, full-featured, and open API, many startups have capitalized on that opportunity and have developed a plethora of third-party add-ons for VMware vSphere. VMware has strategically acquired the best of them to integrate directly into the product suite. Features have been added throughout the years, such as Log Insight (from Pattern Insight), Network Insight (from Arkin), and True Visibility Suite (from Blue Medora), to name a few. Many of these add-on products were available à la carte through licensing tiers but have since been bundled into what we know today as VCF Operations.

Secondary to vCenter itself, VCF Operations is the go-to tool for many VMware admins who have access to it. VCF Operations provides a tremendous depth and breadth of information for VMware environments, beyond what is available in vCenter, and at enterprise scale, it’s an incredibly valuable resource. That being said, VCF Operations can be complex and has a steeper learning curve for successful adoption, so it is not often used outside of VMware teams.

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights has a similar story, with the progenitor being SANscreen^® software, a SAN observability tool that NetApp acquired in 2008. SANscreen provided the inspiration for NetApp OnCommand^® Insight, which became a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the form of Cloud Insights and is known today as Data Infrastructure Insights.

For years, Data Infrastructure Insights and it’s previous iterations have offered storage admins management of and observability into their heterogeneous, hybrid multicloud estates at an unprecedented breadth and depth. Data Infrastructure Insights features deep integration with other elements of the data center to provide a comprehensive view, offering AI-powered insights into the modern compute and storage environment.

Data Infrastructure Insights offers a simple approach, including out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, and alerts for near-instant time to value. Data Infrastructure Insights is delivered exclusively as a SaaS offering to eliminate meta management, and it gives the right information in the right context to the right audience. And unlike VCF Operations, Data Infrastructure Insights does not rely on any third-party development for extended functionality.

Ultimately the situation is a lot like owning both an electric vehicle (EV) and a gasoline-powered SUV. They both have four wheels and can get you places, but the use cases are different enough that the two vehicles complement each other. Having an EV for low-cost commuting and around-town driving is complemented by a large vehicle that can haul things or take your family on a road trip.

In a similar way, Data Infrastructure Insights and VCF Operations can complement each other in an IT organization. For example, if a storage team is troubleshooting a performance issue, with Data Infrastructure Insights, they have detailed views and powerful correlation into the entire storage infrastructure. They can quickly identify a performance bottleneck or configuration error, and if the problem isn’t storage related, the team can trace it back to the VM and the host that are causing the issue. Then when the storage team tosses the issue over the fence to the VMware team, the VMware team already knows where to start looking. Both teams have then avoided the wasted time of kicking the issue back and forth. Conversely, if a VMware team believes that they have a storage problem, they can use VCF Operations to check the VMs and hosts and then give the storage team a datastore or a LUN to start looking at.

In a perfect world, everybody in ITOps is in perfect sync at all times and is fully invested in doing their part in the best way possible. We know that that’s not always the case, though: Incorrect assumptions are often made, which can lead to a lot of finger-pointing and misplaced blame. Avoiding this scenario is where the feature overlap between Data Infrastructure Insights and VCF Operations adds value to your organization rather than being needlessly redundant.

Let’s say, for example, that your VMware admin sees in VCF Operations that a VM has storage latency, and the admin sends the trouble ticket to your storage team. This latency may be just a symptom of another problem, because there are many layers of abstraction between the VM and the back-end LUN. Chasing down the bottleneck can be a tedious process, involving many different teams and tools. However, Data Infrastructure Insights understands the entire data path between the VM and the back-end LUN, including the Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK), datastore, host, SAN switches, and storage nodes.

With the SAN Analyzer tool, Data Infrastructure Insights can show on a single screen all the pertinent metrics and the alerts related to those objects. It can also automatically identify any resource contention and incorporate any configuration changes that may be related to the issue. Instead of troubleshooting one thing at a time, your teams can correlate everything side by side, immediately pinpoint the actual bottleneck (or identify the root cause), and address it accordingly.

The end result is much better collaboration between your IT teams. Customers have reported up to 75% faster Mean Time to Innocence/Resolution, reduced configuration errors, and elimination of functional silos in the ITOps organization.

Both VMware VCF Operations and NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights offer powerful capability for managing your IT infrastructure, with each having its strengths and unique features. VMware VCF Operations is more granular for VMware infrastructure, making it suitable for environments that require detailed VM and physical hardware monitoring. As a compliment, NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights excels in providing comprehensive SAN insights to storage and cross-functional IT teams, and a more integrated approach to infrastructure monitoring.

Take the first step to empower your storage teams. Learn more about NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights and request a free demonstration to see it in action today.