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NetBrain vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (17th), Network Automation (5th)
vRealize Network Insight
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (36th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (39th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 3.1%, up 2.5% compared to last year.
vRealize Network Insight, on the other hand, focuses on IT Infrastructure Monitoring, holds 0.8% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetBrain3.1%
Wireshark14.3%
AirMagnet Survey PRO10.3%
Other72.3%
Network Troubleshooting
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
vRealize Network Insight0.8%
Zabbix6.1%
Datadog4.1%
Other89.0%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
Shaijith KB - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Specialist at General Directorate of Residence and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA)
Comprehensive management and detailed reports benefit operations while improvements are needed in support and maintenance
We have Tanzu and OpenShift. We have OpenShift, Canonical, and the Tanzu one. The Tanzu platform from VMware is a Kubernetes platform. We haven't completely installed Tanzu yet; we installed the vROps part. vRealize Network Insight is beneficial because you can control the East-West traffic. vRealize has a component called NSX, which has East-West traffic controlling and micro-segmentation, that is one of the best options, and we have the layer extension, layer 2 extension possible through NSX. If you have anything accountable in any business, even in a candy business, having proper accountability on what you are selling and buying will save a lot. If you don't know what you're selling and buying, you will end up with a loss. My team does not use the flow analytics feature; we have a security and network monitoring team, which is a different SOC team. I am using it as an administrator internally. We perform different tasks including costing analysis, capacity management, and many other things. vRealize Network Insight has a concern about the maintenance part, as it requires a person to monitor it completely. It's not something you install and your report will be generated automatically. You have to work on this properly to get the insights. vRealize Network Automation, vRealize Operations, and vRealize Network Insight are completely related to the network. I cannot say much about these network aspects because I am on the operations side, but overall, the vRealize suite is good for reporting perspective or any ISO-related documentation; this is very helpful. The product is called vRealize Operations Manager, and now it is referred to as Aria or vAria. I am now a Senior System Specialist. We use different metrics because we have multiple departments, and we can monitor utilization and comparisons with the previous year. On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"It allows us to see how the network devices function as well as to see network glitches or fluctuations or dropping of packets."
"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."
"It allowed us to set up NSX and to do microsegmentation, without all of the pain points of having to determine each port and each IP address that needed to have access, and which ones needed to be blocked."
"Whenever we say "valuable" with respect to the network, it's more towards the security. The firewall rule issues it shows us and the recommendations that we get from vRNI are the most valuable features because they are actually making our network more secure."
"It's a very powerful, very manageable product."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well."
"The most valuable features are the packet trace flow and that the view of the whole environment is deep."
 

Cons

"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"Support could be much better."
"I would like to see them expand the capabilities to infrastructure types other than just VMware."
"The solution can be improved by making it more compatible with other brands, allowing for better integration."
"The compatibility with each and every component of the infrastructure is the main thing that I am looking for. I would like them to make sure that it's compatible with different kinds of storage systems, etc. I have seen the compatibility list. I feel it can be more compatible than it is right now."
"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."
"The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco."
"The virtual appliance has rebooted."
"If it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, what script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."
"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."
"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."
"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."
"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."
"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."
"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."
"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise41
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?
In VMware you have to buy a separate license for it. We have VVF and VCF-type of licenses, and if you want to go with this NSX and sort of higher-end professional services, you need to go with VCF....
What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?
There is room for improvement as not all cases are getting resolved, and we often do not get L3 support directly, having to go through L1 and L2, resulting in delays that usually are a headache for...
What is your primary use case for vRealize Network Insight?
We have Tanzu, and we also work with multiple Kubernetes services such as Nutanix and Google. We are working on these Kubernetes services on the operations side. For Tanzu, we have several componen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Arkin
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
884,656 professionals have used our research since 2012.