I have only had the opportunity to use two of Blue Medora's many Management Packs, but after being thoroughly impressed by the Cisco UCS MP, I wanted to get my hands on the NetApp MP. I recently switched companies and they (I suppose it;'s technically "we"), use NetApp almost exclusively, making this the perfect use case.
I throttled my expectations after a less than spectacular experience with EMC's Storage Analytics about 18 months ago (it could be improved now), which provided, in my opinion at least, very little value at an absolute maximum cost. Maybe Dell will bring the "crown jewel of the EMC Federation" into a closer partnership with EMC itself and right this wrong, but for now, it's an expense disappointment. In any event, my expectations weren't high. Blue Medora however, quickly impressed, just as it had done with the Cisco UCS MP. With something in the neighborhood of 700 metrics being brought in through a simple connection to the NetApp OCUM, it was far more robust than I anticipated. Working in both 7 mode and cluster mode, and with metrics ranging from the familiar badge scores to cluster, aggregate, and volume latency, IOPS, and read/write data, it has everything you could possibly want brought into the almost mythological single-pane-of-glass view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So many metrics, across so many layers...
All of this is fantastic already, but the real value comes in the correlation between the virtual, compute, and storage layers. The object relationships between them is where the biggest value add is. Knowing the health and having the metrics of every layer of the environment from vCenter to the VM's and datastores, from the Fabric Interconnect to the fans in the chassis, knowing the esxhost001.mystuff.com IS the blade server in chassis 4/slot 5, and then topping that off by knowing what NetApp system, aggregate, and volume my datastore that hosts my VM's sits on ..... priceless!
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
All those object relationships. A view of the entire stack in one simple dashboard. She's beautiful!
I really can't say enough about the quality of what Blue Medora delivers on this NetApp MP. It's quality from top to bottom, easy to install, and with 14 NetApp dashboards right out of the box, it adds value right from the very data first collection.
Bravo, Blue Medora!
