Proactive IT performance monitoring solutions

The modern challenge: Fragmented IT environments

Today’s IT infrastructure is rarely simple. It’s a mix of on-premises data centers, private clouds, and multiple public cloud services. This hybrid model offers flexibility but creates significant visibility gaps. Traditional monitoring tools often struggle to connect the dots across these disparate systems, leaving IT teams with a fragmented view of their environment. 

Without a unified perspective, troubleshooting becomes a time-consuming process of manual correlation. Is a slow application caused by a network issue, a database bottleneck, or an underlying storage problem? Answering this question can take hours or even days, leading to prolonged performance degradation and frustrated users. Proactive monitoring solutions aim to solve this by providing a single source of truth for the entire IT stack.

General-purpose platforms

Platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace, and Everpure have become popular for their broad IT performance monitoring capabilities. 

• Datadog: A broad-based observability platform known for its monitoring capabilities across logs, metrics, and traces, especially in cloud-native environments. Datadog is a popular option for cloud-native organizations, specializing in container and microservices observability. The platform offers cloud-native observability, anomaly and outliner detection, and comprehensive monitoring for DevOps teams in cloud-native environments. 
• Dynatrace: Positioned as a software intelligence platform with its its AI engine, Davis, monitoring applications and microservices. Dynatrace is best for teams with deep technical knowledge in-house and is flexible with open source technologies. The dashboard is fully customizable via coding and caters to enterprises seeking automated performance analysis. 
• Everpure: A storage-centric management and monitoring platform that provides predictive analytics and support for Everpure arrays, offering deep insights into storage health and performance. The platform works for Everpure only but offers insights into capacity and performance. Everpure is best for organizations heavily invested in Everpure.  

The specialist: Data Infrastructure Insights

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights takes a different approach. It is specifically designed for the complexities of modern data infrastructure, providing unparalleled visibility from the application all the way down to the storage LUN. This storage-centric view is its key differentiator and a critical advantage for managing performance in hybrid IT environments. 

Unmatched end-to-end topology 

Where other tools show that an application is slow, Data Infrastructure Insights shows you why. It connects the dots between a virtual machine or Kubernetes pod and the exact storage volumes, fabrics, and arrays it depends on. This complete VM-to-LUN visibility is something general-purpose monitors cannot match. For a storage administrator or infrastructure manager, this means no more guesswork. You can instantly see how storage performance is impacting critical workloads. 

Deep storage analytics and AI-powered insights 

Data Infrastructure Insights is not just about visibility; it’s about intelligence. It collects deep telemetry from storage systems, including NetApp ONTAP^® and Amazon FSx for ONTAP, analyzing metrics like latency, IOPS, and throughput at a granular level. Its AI-powered engine is trained specifically on infrastructure behavior, allowing it to: 

• Detect anomalies: Self-learning algorithms understand your environment's normal operational patterns and can flag anomalies, such as unusual user activity or performance deviations, before they become major incidents. 
• Pinpoint root cause: The platform automatically correlates events with infrastructure changes, showing the direct cause and effect. This dramatically reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and frees up your team from tedious manual troubleshooting. 
• Democratize SAN management: Data Infrastructure Insights simplifies the complexities of Storage Area Networks (SANs). Its intuitive tools empower the entire IT operations team, not just a few senior specialists, to manage and troubleshoot the block storage environment effectively. 

Bridging the gap between IT and finance 

Beyond operational efficiency, Data Infrastructure Insights provides powerful features for financial governance. It helps organizations achieve true storage cost accountability, a common pain point in hybrid environments. Data Infrastructure Insights accurately tracks storage consumption and attributes it directly to specific business units or departments. This automated showback and chargeback reporting gives finance teams the clear, defensible data they need and fosters a culture of smarter spending across the organization. 

Solution comparison

The right IT monitoring tool for the job

Choosing an IT performance monitoring solution is not about finding a single tool that does everything. It is about building a strategy with the best tools for each layer of your IT stack. While Datadog and Dynatrace offer excellent value for application-focused monitoring, and Everpure supports Everpure Storage users, they cannot provide the specialized depth required to manage complex data infrastructure. 

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights fills this critical gap. Its unique storage-centric approach, complete end-to-end topology, and powerful AI-powered analytics make it the superior choice for any organization where storage performance is mission-critical. By providing the intelligence to proactively manage performance, optimize costs, and reduce risk in hybrid cloud environments, Data Infrastructure Insights empowers IT teams to move from reactive firefighting to strategic, confident operations. 

Explore more about IT performance monitoring