The Jazzy New Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7: Security Focused ONTAP Management
Dhiman Chakraborty
Simplicity is no longer a theme with NetApp® Active IQ® Unified Manager, it’s a continuous improvement cycle. A cycle that brings goodies for customers in all spheres with every release, whether it’s better NetApp ONTAP® management or simplified operational monitoring capabilities. The Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7 release announces several enhancements, exciting new features, and product integration meant for the new breed of infrastructure and automation engineers. A lot of new features focus on a few areas—simplicity, automation, active management, and virtualization layer monitoring and reporting, along with strengthening dark site support.
Refreshingly new dashboard
With Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7, you get a brand-new dashboard that can be scoped by the data center or by an individual cluster for better visibility of your environment. The HTML5-based GUI (with no flash dependency) gives you simple navigation capabilities; starting with a brand-new dashboard consisting of several cards, each card presents an overview of various aspects of the clusters it is monitoring, ranging from capacity metrics to security adherence to workload conformance.
Security dashboard
The Security dashboard presents a layered view—an overall representation and a detailed view that checks for conformance against all the ONTAP security hardening best practices. This means that you don’t have to write any custom script to check for compliance; in fact, you can leave the whole conformance monitoring aspect to Unified Manager. The conformance monitoring checks against clusters, storage virtual machines, data at rest, and the authentication mechanism.
Self-healing capabilities with the Management Actions dashboard
There are three big announcements about the current release:- Active IQ and Active IQ Unified Manager integration
- NetApp Service Level Manager and Active IQ Unified Manager are now a single installer
- With VMware awareness, gain visibility into VMs through the eyes of Unified Manager
Troubleshooting ONTAP is easy with the Workload Analysis feature
Unified Manager has always been the go-to solution for ONTAP (performance) analysis. Our customers love the way that Unified Manager helps in breaking down a problem with the right KPIs, saving operational cycles while dealing with medium to complex problems. The 9.7 release pursues this goal further by providing a single page where each object can be referenced against all performance vectors to determine the bottleneck. Again, simplicity is the primary goal, reducing performance analysis from multiple clicks to just a couple.For example, let’s say that you get a slow performance event for a storage target. Even though the event details and the relevant topology show suggested actions to fix the issue, you may want to understand the event better. Just click the Analyze Workload tab to go to Workload Analysis page.
The next blog posts in this series will focus on the three new announcements about how NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7 simplifies your operational complexities.
For more information
Please follow the video on overall demonstration of Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkPqJsouHo
For all your ONTAP active management needs, monitoring virtual environments and running ONTAP securely look no further. NetApp® Active IQ® Unified Manager 9.7 is your one-stop solution. As long as you plan to manage and monitor ONTAP, Unified Manager 9.7 comes with no licensing obligations. The install guide is available here.
Download your installer and get started today!
Dhiman Chakraborty
Next Steps
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