vRealize Network Insight Reviews

We use it to manage our servers, our virtual vSphere environment. It has performed exceptionally. We're able to get a lot of versatility into our network, into our STDC, with the VMs and the NSX that we also have running.

It has really tightened down the security. That was something that we were lacking.

It has also given us deep visibility into our network. We can really get down and see all of the traffic within the data center, between the VMs, between the applications, database servers, other application servers, web servers. We can identify everything that is communicating, and we can see it all on one product.

The most valuable feature is the visibility into what's going on, our traffic going through the data center. We'd like to put in micro-segmentation, eventually, so that we can actually protect our data center, our VMs, within the environment. It would just add another level of security. It gives us the visibility to do that.

I find it user-friendly and intuitive. With the GUI interface that we do use on a regular basis, it's easy to navigate, it's easy to see, easy to query. We get reports. It's easy to use.

I'm not quite sure what features I would like to see in a future release. We haven't explored everything in the product yet. We're able to pull out of it what we need right now.

We haven't had any problems with stability. We pretty much implemented it with a brand new solution - we implemented it at the same time as a data center refresh we just went through. We're really looking to be able to take it to the next level and put some micro-segmentation into our data center and this tool will help us do that.

Scalability has not been an issue at all. Since it's a brand new build, I'm not quite sure yet because we haven't had the need to add additional servers or additional VMs. But I don't anticipate any challenges there.

The technical support has been great. We have vendor support as well as technical support with VMware. We really haven't run into too many challenges with this product at all so I can't say that I've even had to call tech support yet on it. It has been running pretty flawlessly.

We had a previous version of the hardware - I'm not going to say who the vendor was - but we had a previous hardware implementation that had to be pulled out and then we had to bring in a newer version of it because it did not meet our needs.

We went with this solution because I was working with that vendor when they actually made good on the deal and made it more attractive for us to stay with their solution instead of going to bid again.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the ease of working with them. Honesty, communication, obviously. We want them to let us know if there are any pitfalls, anything to give us a heads-up on, we'd like to hear that. We've had some problems in the past with some vendors that didn't disclose everything and that caused some challenges. We are definitely looking to work with vendors that are trustworthy.

The initial setup was very straightforward. A big reason why we come to these shows, like VMworld 2018, is to get some more knowledge and training and talk with the professionals. We worked with VMware on the setup, and with our network engineer and our sysadmins. With their help, it was pretty easy to implement, no challenges there.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It's not a 10 because of our experience with the vendor. I believe the product is a great product and, obviously, the VMware applications that we're using, we have had no issues with them.

We have deployed vRealize Network Insight in two or three environments for our customers' NSX implementations. It helps us in creating the network architecture and planning before deploying NSX. We use Network Insight to gather data and determine firewall rules and communication between virtual machines.

So far, vRealize Network Insight is helping us to decide on architecture and NSX networks for our customers.

One of the valuable features of Network Insight is its ability to provide detailed information about east-west traffic within the data center. With this product, we can precisely identify communication patterns between virtual machines within our data center, whether it's east-east or east-west communication.

There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar. Our currency is a bit weak at the moment. It becomes a little expensive to buy this kind of product.

vRealize Network Insight has good technical support. It's really good support.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. It's an easy setup, like plug-and-play. It's just a matter of deploying the virtual appliances and making a few configurations to start collecting data. The hardest part is analyzing the data, but the network consultants help us with reports to determine the filters we need to apply on the NSX firewalls.

Only one person is required for maintenance. We have just one analyst who knows how to handle vRealize Network Insight, and it's okay. We don't need additional personnel because our customers have small environments. So, we don't require a whole team of two or three, or four people to work with vRealize Network Insight.

I saw some ROI. Our customer teams have been able to spend less time on operational duties, vRealize Network Insight allows them to accomplish more with the same number of people on their teams. I do know that they are saving time.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. vRealize can improve and lower the price a little. Here, in Brazil, we have a distributor between the reseller and the manufacturer, and this distributor has a significant impact on the final cost of the product. But I do believe that they can lower it a bit. It's always a good choice to lower something, especially prices. 

Overall, I would give vRealize Network Insight a nine out of ten. 

The network assurance is great. 

It's useful for analyzing networks.

The product offers good data integration with other products as well.

It's a very powerful, very manageable product. 

The initial setup is simple. 

It has a very nice user interface and is user-friendly.

In some integrations with other products like F5, Cisco, and others, we sometimes encounter some bugs, and we sometimes have some integration issues that require us to contact VMware support to try to solve the problems. We'd like the simplification of integrations in the future.

Support could be much better. They do not do a good job of finding issues. 

The security could be enhanced slightly.

We've used the solution for almost two years. 

It's a stable product. We do not find it to be excessively buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. In some projects, we deploy it as clusters, and it works out well. It depends on the customer's environment. 

We've had issues in the past. In two cases, we have some clients who had issues, and we weren't given any solution to the problems. They are both still ongoing issues. 

When customers do not speak English well, there are also issues with communication. They need to take a bit more time with non-native speakers. 

Neutral

I do not have experience with any other products at this time. 

This is not a hard solution to set up. It's very straightforward and quite simple. I'd rate the ease of setup a five out of five. 

I tend to deploy the solution in customer environments. 

I don't know about the licensing of the VRNI, and I'm on the deployment side of the product. The sales teams deal with pricing. 

It's my understanding that the price is per device. I'm not 100% sure, however.

We are a VMware business partner in Turkey.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case for the product is for preparing for NSX deployments, looking at flows between VMs, and to help us troubleshoot also.

It has helped us tremendously to be able to easily deploy NSX in our environment with microsegmentation. It has also helped us with time to value. It has helped with network visibility for sure.

NetFlow to help us understand how VMs communicate with each other over ports that are known and ports that are also unknown to us. Our company is a security company, so it's very important for us to know exactly which VMs are doing what at all times.

It's very intuitive and friendly to use. It's a very Google-like search, you just type in a VM name and it pops up with that information and you can look at all the flows right from the single pane of glass.

It's kind of hard (to come up with room for improvement) on an almost-perfect product. Room for improvement: Maybe a little more help in regards to when you're searching for something, give me little "help bubbles" about what those terms will help search for.

The product itself is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have used tech support for vRNI for doing upgrades and for deployment considerations, and the experience was fantastic.

I was involved in the original deployment. Very straightforward, very easy to deploy.

The upgrade experience for vRNI is probably one of the easiest out there. You enable a support tunnel, you let them know, and they do it all remotely, and it just works

The ROI for vRNI is, in my opinion, that it especially helps with deploying NSX, that you're not having to manually chase down and figure out what you need to do to microsegment VMs. This gives a nice option where you can say, "Hey, this VM, show me what flows are there." I can export it out and then import it as an NSX rule and job done.

There was nobody else on our shortlist when we chose vRNI.

The rating for the product would be a nine because I don't know of anything that would be a ten. Nothing's perfect.

Going through our logs within the system, it's easier to identify issues. For example, the filtering in order to show correct errors. In addition, the troubleshooting timeframe shortens a lot with our product.

Instead of gathering so many resources, such as, multiple system engineers, network engineers, and search engineers, now it's all in one shop. One person can actually troubleshoot the issue without bringing in so many people. The troubleshooting time has been greatly reduced.

The pricing is steep.

The past two months.

I have had no issues so far, since the deployment. It's been pretty stable.

It is very easy to work with; you can add nodes as you go. As your environment grows, you can add nodes to it, increase it, then scale out.

Technical support is great. They do excellent work. They stay on top of their tickets and support cases. We get updates on a daily basis, so I'm very satisfied with the support.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

We have a temporary in-house person. I recommend having a temporary in-house person.

Turbonomic.

We chose VMware for their product, their environment, and the confidence level of using the product itself.

The way technology works, you've got to catch up. If you're basically staying in a legacy environment, and everything is moving rapidly, you've got to stay ahead of the game.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: customer support.

My recommendation: If you're looking to minimize your downtime, your troubleshooting, and the amount of resources being used in order to look at logs and troubleshoot an issue, this is the solution.

Our primary use case for vRNI is to have an overall dashboard for east-west traffic in our hospital. It is used to catch anomalies, like system which are not being used or being overutilized. Its performance is great.

vRNI has improved our organization mostly through our NSX deployment. When we deployed NSX, we were able to watch the flows and create the rules which are normally unseen. When we are going through an application, we have a list of ports (allow or denied rules in NSX). With vRNI, we are able to watch what is happening. If something is not listed or spec'd out by the vendor, but still necessary, like interfaces or engines, we can catch them without causing downtime to the production application when we implemented NSX.

It definitely helps us manage our network. It provides that deep visibility into what is happening with traffic. You usually don't think of where your traffic is coming from (e.g., this server is connect to that server), but you have your authentication level and other flows that you never even think of. This product helps us with the visualization.

The most valuable features of the vRNI is to be able to catch anomalies as they pop up. 

If we have a question about how something is being used, or not being used, we can go to vRNI, review it, finding systems that should have been decommissioned. They are just sitting there as unclaimed resources. 

vRNI is extremely user-friendly. Out-of-the-box, we can hook it up to our vCenter and our Cisco switches too. It will pull on the flows and immediately, within the first ten minutes, you can see the traffic. It is very intuitive. It will find the normal flows as it records the traffic. It is a very nice product.

vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX. This was just brought up at the keynote speech.

We are totally stable. Out-of-the-box, it starts running day one. We have not had an issue so far.

As far as scalability, give vRNI disk space and it scales out.

We have not used tech support with vRNI so far. 

I was involved in the initial installation. It was very straightforward and simple: Give it an OVA and IP address and point to the vCenter and switches. 

We have not gone through an upgrade process yet, but I don't think it will be an issue. We will see when we get there.

Our NSX team helped us do the install in the beginning. So far, we haven't had any questions about it since the initial installation.

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.

We never even a solution existed until we saw vRNI.

I would rate the vRNI a ten out of ten. It has given us value since day one. We can see more than before. This helps.

We currently use it to find specific defects in our network flows. We're trying to streamline all our virtual needs with respect to network flows.

The primary use case is to make sure that we disperse our dollars in the right sense; that we use it the way we're supposed to use it, optimally. The idea is to understand how it works and do more of it and eliminate things that don't make sense.

In terms of performance, so far so good. Nobody is complaining.

For the people who know how to use it, it's easily manageable. We want to increase the technical knowledge of the personnel who handle these types of things. I don't think we're there yet. But the few who use it, what it brings to the table has definitely helped us move forward.

It enables us to understand what is happening in the VDI space and respond to things that don't work.

It's intuitive and very user-friendly, but we probably have to train our technical team, or the IT staff who are plugging into it regularly, on how to optimize its use. VMware probably needs to come in and train and we need good documentation.

I had a meeting with the technical account manager, and I brought to his attention that the lack of access to documentation on best practices is something that we need to address. That's something that he said he is working on. We have a meeting tomorrow and he is going to bring all of us onto the same page and, hopefully, that issue can be resolved. I came in to make sure that we can harden our security infrastructure, especially when it comes to VMware. And one of the things that I learned recently was that there are so many documents that we don't have access to regarding the use of VMware. My technical account manager promised me that the documentation will be provided to whomever needs access to it.

I don't think downtime is a problem. However, stability is still in question because I don't think we have tested it to the core. We have not rolled it out to as many people as we wish we could. But so far, for the few that we have rolled it out to, performance and stability are acceptable to management.

We can see that it is scalable, but once again we're not there yet. We need to do more testing to confirm that it is actually scalable.

I love what we can do with this and I love everything it gives to us.

I rate it a nine out of ten because I don't see users complaining a lot. For what we need, for the most part, we get it. It's not 100 percent, it's not like something we distributed to the whole organization. But I'm sure the CIO will want to do that when we can. 

Login site gives you the opportunity to collect logs from all of your hypervisors and your virtual servers, then put them all in one location and make them searchable.

It's faster access and searchability of the logs for troubleshooting.

Better integration into VRB.

We did our due diligence, studied best practices, read the documentation, prepared a plan, presented the plan, and everybody understood what's going to happen.

It is best to have a contingency plan to back out if things go wrong.

Stability is there. A 10 out of 10.

Scalability is about a 10 out of 10.

I have not used technical support for this solution.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward. It took about 10 minutes.

We used an in-house team.

Dell EMC, Hitachi, and sometimes Microsoft.

We chose VMware because they have one of the better products on the market for what they do: virtualization.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that they're there when you need them.

For someone looking at this solution: Look deep.