In most businesses, few employees are more time-constrained than members of the IT team — and the daily work of troubleshooting technical problems is one of the biggest causes. At its annual user conference, Nutanix leaders introduced a new offering designed to simplify and automate much of the troubleshooting process, while reducing the number of issues IT leaders will need additional support to solve.
Nutanix Insights “can make a dramatic improvement to your IT efficiency while optimizing the performance and health” of your IT environment, said Marc Trouard-Riolle, a senior product manager for Nutanix. Trouard-Riolle spoke at the Global .NEXT Digital Experience, which runs through Sept. 11
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What Is Nutanix Insights?
Effective infrastructure monitoring is a challenge for IT teams, especially those whose networks are growing. It’s vital to streamline the process using predictive and automated tools.
Launched to customers in July, Nutanix Insights is a predictive health and support automation service. It uses Nutanix Pulse telemetry, Trouard-Riolle said, for businesses to discover “gaps in their cloud’s health availability or performance.”
Insights had previously been available only to Nutanix’s own support professionals but is now available to all Nutanix customers. It’s designed to provide IT managers with a single view of actionable discoveries, ranking issues by degree of importance to help administrators prioritize their efforts.
It does this by using artificial intelligence to compare what it already knows about healthy configurations with what it’s discovering with inside a customer’s network.
“Essentially, it bridges the gap between what is and what should be in your infrastructure,” Trouard-Riolle said.
Insights makes recommendations to administrators on how to resolve issues — by updating software or patching firmware, for example. In cases where an issue needs to be elevated to Nutanix support, Insights even automates the “technical support work” necessary to start a case, he said.
“It automatically opens the case, collects the relevant logs and diagnostic information from the correct time period and assigns a systems reliability engineer to the case,” he said.
In fact, however, Nutanix has found that customers using Insights are able to resolve more of their own issues, reducing the need to elevate cases to Nutanix support. But when such assistance is needed, cases tend to be resolved more quickly because Nutanix has all the information it needs.
During the first half of 2020, prior to Insights rolling out to customers in July, Nutanix found that about a third of cases opened with its support group had “associated insight” that would probably have allowed the customer to resolve the issue independently, without needing to await assistance.
Requirements for Enabling Nutanix Insights
Businesses need to have certain things set up within their networks in order to take advantage of Insights.
First, they must have Nutanix Pulse telemetry configured on their cloud clusters, because Pulse is what provides Nutanix with details about a customer’s cluster configurations, Trouard-Riolle said. When enabling Pulse, customers should also click the option to include additional support information.
In addition, businesses must be running least version 3.9.4.1 of Nutanix Cluster Check.
Insights is already impressing businesses, according to customers quoted by Nutanix. “Not having a ticket to open is already a good thing, but the possibility to see the problems related to a version installed on a cluster and how to solve them is great,” Olivier Massoni, systems engineer with Compass Group France, said.
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