NetApp's Active IQ uses AIOps to automate the proactive care and optimization of NetApp environments. Active IQ works in the background to uncover opportunities to protect and support the storage environment, providing analytics-based insights, prescriptive guidance, and automated action to improve system health and create higher system availability.
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Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
If you have a NetApp or multiple NetApps, then you SHOULD use NetApp Active IQ. It is an invaluable tool. It acts like another FTE in our environment by keeping us informed. NetApp Active IQ is an excellent product; there are always areas for improvement based on evolving customer needs. NetApp Active IQ is a compliment to NetApp, pure and simple! Keep it linked at all times and make your account managers a part of your team; the product works so well, give your account managers something to do, have them keep you informed and have them help you update. I have seen a major change in NetApp account teams; they want to support their customers! Good Job NetApp!
It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.
We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
Despite some interface issues, it mostly accomplishes what we need it to accomplish - give us a heads up on problems in our environment and prepare us for upgrades/patches.
You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
You can see the list of tools above; NetApp Active IQ is a compliment to the tools. Not one monitor will take care of all your needs. I am ok with 3 dashboards for my environment. SolarWinds rotates in NOC mode, NetApp Active IQ is up on its own with all the NetApp's registered, and the Palo Alto Dashboard which monitors for vulnerabilities and risks. The tools work hand in hand in the environment, working both North/South and East/West, letting us know about anomalies, risks, and pending tasks to schedule. I love ALL my tools working together; lets me sleep really well at night!
I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.
It has caught problems on our clusters before they became true issues. It was immensely helpful to be aware of the problem so we could resolve in advance.
It has provided specific steps to mitigate issues during patching and upgrades that we wouldn't have otherwise known about.
I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.
