When you first log into Classic System Manager, the top left corner has a list of cluster and node faults. These are summarized into clickable links. When you click one of the links, you get redirected to another page in System Manager.

You also had a separate area that shows the cluster HA state to see whether a node has failed over. In the following images, we see the dashboard view and what we see when we click on one of the links―in this case, our failed disks.

To see other alerts, you must navigate back to the dashboard, which takes time and extra clicks. One of the goals of the new System Manager view is to simplify this process.

The following figure shows the new System Manager dashboard. The two main differences for the health and alert views are that we now have the node HA state and alerts in the same window, and, rather than clicking away from the main dashboard, the alerts are now in a drop-down box.

Extra clicks are also reduced for capacity views. In classic ONTAP System Manager, the capacity and storage efficiency ratios were found under Cluster Overview and had tabs to click around to find information. The new System Manager view consolidates the storage efficiency ratios and capacity views into a single graphic.

The data protection views have been moved to their own dashboard under Protection. This page provides deeper, more granular looks at the data protection in the cluster and also provides a location to leverage the new SnapMirror Business Continuity (SM-BC).

ONTAP System Manager 9.8 also removes the Application and Objects view in favor of a new Network Visualization view that shows network topology for the cluster, as well as red X’s when a port is down.

Performance data graphs in System Manager now retain data for the cluster up to 1 year, rather than having classic System Manager performance data only be available while you are logged in. In ONTAP System Manager 9.8, you can now click on the hour, day, week, month, or year. There is also a way to download performance data to a CSV.

In high file- count environments, trying to find information about folder capacity, data age, and file counts usually requires time-intensive commands or scripts that run serial operations over NAS protocols, such as ls, du, find, and stat.

ONTAP System Manager 9.8 provides a way for admins to find out file system information in any NAS storage volume quickly and easily by enabling a low-impact scanner for each volume. This scanner crawls the ONTAP file system in the background with a low priority job and delivers a wealth of information that is available as soon as you navigate to a volume in System Manager 9.8 or later.

Enabling File Systems Analytics is as easy as navigating to the volume you want to scan. Go to Storage > Volumes and then use the search to find your desired volume. Click the volume, and then the Explorer tab.

From here, you see the Enable Analytics link on the right side of the page.

After you click enable, the scanner starts. The time of completion depends on the number of objects in the volume as well as the system load. After it is finished, you see the entire directory structure populated in the System Manager view. This view can be navigated down the directory tree, and it provides access for history information, directory size information, and file sizes.

The following figure shows views from the Tech_ONTAP volume in my cluster, which I use as an archive for NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast episodes.

When you click a folder, a file list appears on the right side of the page.

If you choose, you can enable Show Accessed Time to get a look at the last time a file was accessed.

At the bottom of the page, you can see how much data hasn’t been accessed in a year, as well as the directory and file counts in that folder.

In addition to being able to quickly find file sizes and directory information, this feature also provides information that can help you decide whether NetApp FabricPool technology would be effective in reducing the amount of cold data that is taking up space on your aggregates.

ONTAP 9.7 introduced a way to see which NFS clients were accessing specific volumes in a cluster, as well as which data LIF IP addresses were in use with the nfs connected-clients command. This command is covered in detail in TR-4067: NetApp ONTAP NFS Best Practices and Implementation Guide. This command is useful for scenarios where you need to find out what clients are attached to the storage system, such as upgrades, tech refreshes, or simple reporting.

ONTAP System Manager 9.8 offers a way to see these clients with the GUI, as well as a way to export the list to a .csv file. Navigate to Hosts > NFS Clients and you see a list of NFS clients that were active in the past 48 hours.

ONTAP 9.8 also brings the following enhancements to System Manager:

The following figure shows MetroCluster and single-click firmware updates.