Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and it can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely through SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to perform tasks. NetApp has developed more than 150 Ansible modules for ONTAP software, enabling further integration with the Ansible automation framework. Ansible modules for NetApp deliver a set of instructions for how to define the desired state and relay it to the target NetApp environment. Modules are built to support tasks like setting up licensing, creating aggregates and storage virtual machines, creating volumes, and restoring snapshots to name a few. An Ansible role has been published on GitHub specific to the NetApp DoD Unified Capabilities (UC) Deployment Guide.

Using the library of available modules, users can easily develop Ansible playbooks and customize them to their own applications and business needs to automate mundane tasks. After a playbook is written, you can run it to execute the specified task, which saves time and improves productivity. NetApp has created and shared sample playbooks that can be used directly or customized for your needs.

Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you visibility into your complete infrastructure. With Cloud Insights, you can monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize all your resources, including your public cloud instances and your private data centers. Cloud Insights can reduce mean time to resolution by 90% and prevent 80% of cloud issues from affecting end users. It can also reduce cloud infrastructure costs by an average of 33% and reduce your exposure to insider threats by protecting your data with actionable intelligence. The Storage Workload Security capability of Cloud Insights enables user behavioral analytics with AI and ML to alert when aberrant user behaviors occur due to an insider threat. For ONTAP, Storage Workload Security makes use of the Zero Trust FPolicy engine.