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FAQ


GENERAL | INSTALL & SCAN | FILE ACCESS MANAGEMENT | STORAGE UTILIZATION MANAGEMENT | IT BENCHMARKING | COST CALCULATOR | REPORTS/EXPORTS | SUPPORT | KNOWN ISSUES

GENERAL

Q – What is Aprigo NINJA?

Aprigo’s on-demand data management platform, Aprigo NINJA, is the simplest way for business-savvy IT managers to quickly reduce storage costs and control access to sensitive data.  Aprigo NINJA helps answer key IT controls questions like:

  • Who has access to what?
  • What is accessible to whom?
  • How is storage being utilized?

Q – Where can I get Aprigo NINJA?

You need to register with Aprigo first via: http://www.aprigo.com, click on the activation email and install the Aprigo NINJA client

Q – How does Aprigo NINJA help me to secure my environment?

  • Gain visibility into your data environment: Aprigo NINJA lets you aggregate all the data sources containing sensitive files into a single unified dashboard.
  • Report on permissions of sensitive folders: Use Aprigo NINJA to aggregate information from Active Directory with ACLs collected from file systems to provide detailed visibility into the actual users that have access to sensitive folders.
  • Perform user entitlements reviews of users and groups: Use Aprigo NINJA to illustrate all the network folders that a user or group has access to, where they gained this access from, and remediate issues.
  • Review data access controls at different point in times: Use Aprigo NINJA to create an audit trail of who had access to what and what was accessible to whom in different points in time.

Q – How does Aprigo NINJA help me in reducing storage costs?

Aprigo NINJA delivers agentless, multi-vendor Storage Utilization Management, which is easy to use and affordable. Unlike other data storage management solutions that require allocating supporting infrastructure such as Compute, DB, Storage and agents, Aprigo NINJA On-Demand architecture provides value in minutes through a unified Data Dashboard, aggregating information about ALL your file servers, NAS appliances, Desktop systems and more. Aprigo NINJA Storage Utilization Management provides detailed file level reporting, folder size reporting, last access. top owners and more. This information is helpful in preparing or justifying:
  • Data Migration projects
  • Data Archive projects
  • Storage Charge-back
  • Tiered storage projects
  • Cloud based storage

Q – How come I need to download your Application if this is a SaaS product?

Downloading the application is the only way for us to scan your environment (can’t do that through the browser), and using the Adobe Air Player (Rich Internet Application) delivers an enhanced user experience.

Q – What platforms are supported by Aprigo NINJA?

Aprigo NINJA’s client software runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 server, Windows 2008 server and Windows 7.
You can scan any CIFS share over the network including NAS devices
Active Directory – Windows 2003, 2008

Q – I really like Aprigo NINJA but I have a Linux / Mac environment…

Mac & Linux NINJA are available in our labs. contact us if you’d like to beta-test those.

Q – How secure is my data?

Aprigo scans and collects meta data only (file name and file attributes), we do not open files.

Any communications from Aprigo NINJA is encrypted via https over port 443 and the metadata is encrypted at-rest with a private key.

Aprigo’s website and web services are hosted at SAS70-II data center : Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading cloud infrastructure provider in the world. To read more about AWS security please click here: http://aws.amazon.com/security/

Q – I never got a confirmation email from you. What’s the deal?

If you have a particularly strict spam filter, please be sure to whitelist www.aprigo.com, and be sure to check your spam box to see if there’s an email from us there.

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INSTALL & SCAN

Q – What are the system requirements to run Aprigo NINJA?

  • Adobe AIR player: http://get.adobe.com/air/
  • An Internet connection
  • For best performance we recommend that you install the Aprigo NINJA client on a system with: 2GB ram, core 2 duo 2.0 GHZ and 50GB hard drive
  • Aprigo NINJA requires a domain account and will scan targets (shares and folders) that are available for the configured account

Q – Why do I need an Aprigo account?

You need to be registered with Aprigo to be able to install Aprigo NINJA and login
By asking you to log in we are also able to keep you up to date with the most recent version of our product

Q – How do I install NINJA?

The Aprigo NINJA install is quick and easy.

If you do not have AIR player the installer will point you to the adobe site to download AIR player.

To download, simply log-in at www.aprigo.com and you will se the download link on your home page.

Q – What credentials do I need to have in order to install and use Aprigo NINJA?

You have to be an admin on the machine Aprigo NINJA client is installed on
To scan network shares & collect Active Directory info you must provide account credentials of a domain admin or backup operator. See more details on the Quickstart Guide

Q – Can I uninstall Aprigo NINJA from one machine and install it on another?

Uninstall can be done via: ‘Add or Remove Programs’
To install on a different machine simply log-in to the website and download your new Aprigo NINJA

Q – How do I start a scan?

Click on the settings icon that is located at the lower left of the screen.
Simply enter a target or a list of targets (Network share or Folder) and Aprigo NINJA will do the rest.

Q – What can I scan?

  • Local folders
  • Network Shares

Q – What is the scan rate?

The scan rate can vary depending on the system specification, network speed and the type of target you are scanning. Generally (on a system with: 4GB of RAM, and at least a Core 2 Duo running at 2 GHz) you can expect the following:

  • Scanning local targets: 1800 files per second
  • Scanning remote targets (over the network): 750 files per second

These scan rates include the time it takes to analyze the scanned data

Note: if you have Symantec anti-virus installed you can expect slower results. For optimal speed you may want to disable the anti-virus while the scan is running

Q – What information is collected during a scan?

We only collect meta data such as: names and types of the files, location, size, owners, dates of creation and modification
In the PRO release we also collect NTFS permissions and Active Directory users and group

Q – How many scans can I run?

You can perform as many scans as you like. However, by default, you can only view your last 5 scans. Your account team can increase that number.
You can scan up to 5 targets each time. Your account team can increase that number
The Settings interface allows you to load a dashboard of older scans . Once you find the scan you would like to view simply click on ‘View Results’

Q - What happens when I reach my scan limit? (500GB in FREE version and Trials)?

You can still scan any folder or share, and the NINJA crawler will stop once it reaches the scan limit . You can view the results for the data scanned. If you need to increase your scan limits during a trial, let us know.

Q – NINJA reports on more files & capacity then what I see in Windows explorer. Why?

NINJA does scan ALL of your environment, including hidden & system files. That’s why in many cases the Aprigo NINJA will report on more files & size. It’s just stuff that’s there, even though Windows Explorer doesn’t tell you about it…

Q – What resources will Aprigo NINJA consume on my machine?

Aprigo NINJA will use available CPU resources. It will use more CPU if no other processes are running and will scale down when other processes ask for them.

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FILE ACCESS MANAGEMENT

Q – What does Aprigo File Access Management provide that windows doesn’t provide natively?

Aprigo NINJA differs in several substantial ways from the built-in windows capabilities:
  • It provides an aggregated, unified view into ALL your data sources (file servers, NAS appliances, desktop systems)
  • It aggregates information collected from active directory with information collected from file systems ACLs (Access Control Lists) in order to illustrate:
    • An actual list of users that have access to a specific folder (Security groups are great to streamline ACLS, but they mean nothing to business users and IT auditors tasks with protecting folders from unuthorized access)
    • All the folders accessible to a specific user, or group
  • In contrast, in Windows you have to navigate through the folder properties dialogs and then separately navigate through Active Directory groups to figure out user and group membership
  • Heterogeneous – it supports Windows file servers and NAS appliances

Q – What does” effective permission” mean?

To answer the question “who can access a folder?”,  you need to take into account NTFS permissions, and then expand any local or domain group to its sub groups and users. This is the only way to report on who can effectively access a folder. Aprigo NINJA automatically collects all the information from NTFS, local users and group and Active Directory and reports on effective permissions.

Q - What is the NTFS Exposure Summary chart?

The NTFS exposure summary chart allows you to quickly understand exposure levels by summarizing three key elements for the folder and its sub-folders. If there are folders who can be accessed by all the people in the company (the Everyone group) you will see a red bar highlighting this exposure. The counts represent NTFS ACLs (Access Control List) as they explicitly defined on the file system.
Specific exposures that are summarized in this chart:
  • Everyone
  • Domain Users
  • Explicit
Each bar shows how many folders in the selected folder tree have the identified exposure. For example: Domain Users can access 10000 folders out of 24000 folders on this folder tree.

Q – What are the different filter options?

The filters allows you to switch between different views. For example when you change the filter to ‘All Groups’ you will get the list of all the groups NINJA found in Active Directory. This allows you to view all membership and permissions and see if permissions or group memberships need to be adjusted.

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STORAGE UTILIZATION MANAGEMENT

Q – How do I see the Storage Utilization Management data for my share?

Selected utilization reports (like: top owners, popular files, distribution by Modify date and distribution by size) are available in the dashboard. You can click on any report to get to the complete utilization view where additional reports are available. You can also use the menu utilization icon (pie)

Q – How do I navigate down the directory structure?

Once in Storage Utilization Management, you can dbl-click on the pie (navigational component by size that shows your top folders) or dbl-click on any folder from the grid
You can navigate through the entire directory structure. However, the summary reports are available for the first 10 levels only.

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IT BENCHMARKING

Q – What is IT Benchmarking/ Community Data?

IT Benchmarking reports allow you to compare usage and costs of data in your environment to other Aprigo community members

Q – Can I compare my self to customers in my industry only?

The ability to choose what type of companies you would like to compare your data is on our road-map

Q – How do I read the IT Benchmarking reports ?

Each report shows side by side the data we found in your environment (blue) and the Community aggregate (green). For example, you can see how much space certain file types or unchanged files take in your environment and compare with the community average.

Q – Can I opt not to share my data with the Community?

If you are a NINJA user this means you also contribute to the Benchmarking statistics. Keep in mind, that all the reports are anonymous and aggregated. No one can see the statistics of your environment but you!

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COST CALCULATOR

Q – What is it?

NINJA allows you to quickly view the annual costs of maintaining data in your environment. Simply click on the $, adjust the annual GB cost to reflect the true cost for your IT organization and see how much you are paying to maintain shares, file types and users in your environment.

Q – If I have different storage tiers, where can I plug different costs per GB?

Today we only enable to you to enter one value. You can enter an average cost if you scan multiple tiers in one run.

Q – What if I do not know my annual cost per GB?

The cost calculator starts with a default value based  an industry average  – if you do not know exactly how much you are spending per GB/year, you can use the default value.

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REPORTS/EXPORTS

Q – What report formats are available ?

Reports are available in both CSV and PDF

Q – How long does it take to complete an export?

The duration of an export depends on the number of records in a report. You get a line for each file and folder scanned.
The export interface provides you with an estimate of the time it would take to complete it.
You can reduce the number of records reported in the export (and the time it takes to export) by applying filters.

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SUPPORT

Q – If I have a question or a problem how do I get support?

We want to make you successful, any question or problems you encounter can be answered by either sending an email to support@aprigo.com, calling us at 781-996-4332 (x-116) or using the live chat support on our website.
You can also  send us feedback via the feedback link in Aprigo NINJA

Q – How can I provide you with log files to troubleshoot my issue?

If you have an issue with a particular scan and would like Aprigo to take a look, please click the Aprigo Dinosaur (at the button right corner in Aprigo NINJA) and hit ‘Send Log Files’. Select the scan that had issues and hit Send. This will send a log to Aprigo support.

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KNOWN ISSUES


Anti-virus and Aprigo NINJA

We recommend to disable anti-virus prior to NINJA installations or upgrades.
If install or upgrade were incomplete or left the application in an unknown state, please disable the anti-virus and re-install.

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