vRealize Network Insight Reviews

Like most companies, we don't necessarily know what ports are necessary for our applications to talk to each other, so we're hoping to get insight on that for increasing our microsegmentation with NSX.

In terms of monitoring network flows, we're just looking specifically at the flows within one VDS, so we can dive down through that VDS and isolate virtual machines. Then it gives us that visualization. We have not moved into the physical side of that at this time.

It's performing very well. We're still going through the learning pains so we haven't quite got out of it most of what we're looking for, yet. We understand that it is in there, we just don't understand how to get it yet.

We're only at the evaluation stage but the benefit we're looking for is to speed the production deployment of the applications in a microsegment environment. We would love to get to that ring of Zero Trust but we're just not there today.

The most valuable features for us are the visualization of the applications. We can actually take them and expose them to our applications analysts as well because they want to know, it's just that they're not necessarily exposed to ports. As somebody told me the other day, "A port is something you plug a cable into."

The solution is also extremely intuitive and user-friendly. When you log in to the application you are presented with a dashboard that is very reasonable for an initial user, and you can then customize it to your specific needs. But for all the data that we've found, we've only had to go through two or three drill-downs to get into that information. So far, we haven't found anything that is very misleading. Sometimes you'll get into some misleading things, "Oh, this is not where I wanted to be," but we really have not found that with the product.

One of the things I've asked about is regarding Log Insight, with their syslog collector. There seems to be a lot of overlap between that and vRNI. I've asked if one of those is going away or if they're moving together and I really haven't been able to get a clear answer. I would like to know that.

It's been very stable. We have not had any problems at all with the deployment.

We haven't made it to the point where we're scaling yet. We haven't hit any performance issues that would cause us to evaluate the scalability.

Technical support is very responsive, knowledgeable, and they're quick to get things done.

We didn't have anything in this space on the virtual side. As we moved deeper into the virtualized world, we lost some of those traditional physical network visibility tools. We were using some of the native NSX visibility tools incorrectly and causing NSX problems, trying to expose that information to our analysts. This was the solution that they gave us that would fix that. I think AppDefense now adds some of that back, but hopefully, they'll work together.

The most important criteria when we're looking at a vendor are

• reliability
• usability.
  

We initially went with what we were using on our traditional memory side, your traditional network monitoring. CA Spectrum is what we use on that side. We've looked at that and some basic netflow monitors.

We would absolutely recommend it. In fact, we've had that experience where it was recommended to us and we said, "We need this, we need to do this."

We are very positive so far with everything we've seen in this tool.

At IBM we enable vRealize Network Insight in our mission-critical architecture, so we'll be using vRealize Network Insight to monitor and get deep inside to our networking, including with NSX.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. It can be a bit painful to deploy. Product provides excellent overview across physical and virtual networks in your virtual environment . In large organizations where vSphere / SDDC / Private Cloud deployments have thousands of VMs and network segments that product definitely bring significant benefit in terms of monitoring, troubleshooting and granular details of network deployment and traffic of connected devices (physical or virtual ) and last but not least holistic view of your network domain. 

The gradual way the Network Insight shows you all the relevant information about your networks. It's pretty good. You can really dig deep deep inside and see where the problem is, where it comes from, what you have inside, how did you configure it. Also, it has alerts so you can have pretty much quite a big overview about your network. This is really something good.

I would give 7 to 8. There is always room for improvement.

For example:

Deployment process ,Appliance and Proxy VM, is getting configuration done in VM Console. This configuration can definitely be done on web interface (e.g. vROPS) for sake of simplicity and admin sanity.

LDAP / Active Directory integration configuration is not straight forwards as with other products on vRealize portfolio

Roles and User permissions configuration differs from other products, and in scenarios where certain group of individual need to have specific permissions across vRealize products  configuration is not out of the box.

Clustering across Geo locations (Dual Site scenarios or different L2 Domains) or any other mechanism that can provide HA or maintain data availability across sites.

Offering few sizes of deployment would benefit customers that don't have big foot print in on-prem or cloud, but still would like to get the product into their infrastructure, for whatever reason. Current size of the virtual appliance is not suitable for small and medium size environments. 

You can deploy proxy VMs, so it means that if you need to monitor different segments or different deployments of NSX you always can deploy a proxy VM and then monitor those networks within your vRealize Network Insight.

I have never actually had a chance to talk with the technical support about the product, but I assume they are brilliant.

We did not. Since the NSX footprint growth in data centers the majority of the cloud providers who are the companies start looking for something to have more gradual detail on the infrastructure in how the network goes and what the network traffic is, so it's better for troubleshooting, better for holistic overview of your network infrastructure. Before that, we didn't use anything. That's why the troubleshooting was a bit difficult.

It is straightforward. You need to have an IP address. You don't need to do any additional configuration of the appliances, but once you deploy the appliances then you need to do the configuration on the cause-all, which I think it's a bit more not that straightforward and not that intuitive. It could be better to have the initial configuration of the pliers to be over a web interface or some other wizard.

We use it for auditing our firewall compliance. For network segmentation, we want to see that we are compliant and that we are staying compliant with the business goals.

We've been using it for about six months and the early work we've been doing with it is promising, it looks good.

It hasn't yet changed the way our organization works, but that's our hope.

The most valuable feature is the visualization. It's really handy to be able to classify network objects as with applications and see the interaction between them. That is really good.

There's enough information there, especially in the visualizations, but I would love to see this in a kiosk mode, where I could have a dashboard for interested stakeholders to see and appreciate what's going on. Then, moving on to a more practical level for our Help Desk, our operations team could benefit by seeing, in real-time, a visual view of the network.

It seems stable, it's fine.

We haven't seen any trouble with scalability yet. We haven't done a full deployment, but so far it seems good.

We haven't had to use technical support, and that is good.

We are a heavily compliance-driven, regulatory type of business, so I needed a way to bridge the gap between an operations team that actually does firewall changes and our business stakeholders to see that the changes they made actually met their business requirements. That was the glue that we didn't have before, that was my motivation.

The selection certainly goes hand in hand with NSX, and we're pushing NSX pretty hard. That was a key factor.

The setup was straightforward, it was good. I did it personally and it was easy.

In terms of value, I think we are getting what we paid for. If we can get it into the other use cases I mentioned above, I think the ROI will be quite positive.

Our company did some work with SolarWinds, but they're not quite the same thing. Also, Dell's old Foglight, I don't know if they're still around. That was another one, but it was not really in the same arena. They didn't really do what we wanted.

It's easy enough to try. Get with their account team, get some trial licenses and give it a whirl. It's worth spending a weekend to give it a shot.

It's hard for me to give it a 10 out of 10, it's hard for me to give it a six out of 10, so my rating is in the middle. The only reason I would not give it a nine or a 10 is for cost reasons. It seems to be one of those things that really belongs as part of the product inherently and not as an add-on. That would be my only concern.

We mostly use it for profiling applications. It works quite well.

It has made the migration to NSX much easier. Most of the sys admins within the smaller silos, they have no idea what ports are needed to run their stuff at all. I am pretty sure the micro-segmentation would never, ever have occurred without it.

• The profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation.
• The alerting is quite nice.

It's user-friendly. It's not super intuitive. It's a rather complicated program. It's networking, and networking is relatively complicated. But it does a really good job of displaying the relationships between things.

They can always build upon it and add more stuff, but as it stands right now, it's perfectly fine.

I would like to see application identification. That would be cool.

I've never had any issues with it. It's up and running all the time.

I've not had to try scaling it at all. The standard sizing, so far, has been more than sufficient.

Technical support has been responsive. The response has always been immediate. Whether or not they've fixed it immediately is a different story. Most of the things I've come to them with have needed some investigation and took a week or so.

The initial setup was trivial.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it to a newer version several times. It has actually improved over time. It's much easier now. You can now just upgrade with the GUI. A single click of a button and off it goes. Before, you had to download all the packages and then manually SFTP them to the server and manually hit the install.

This was really the only solution that provided the features that we were looking for.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is whether or not we think they're going to survive for more than the next license cycle.

I would rate this solution a strong nine out of 10. It would be a 10 if it were free.

We actually write a plugin for vRA that allows customers to integrate with third-party vendors, such as IPAM solutions, DNS, SolarWinds, BlueCat, Infoblox, and about 30 other modules. We both use vRNI and build for it.

It has been performing really well.

We're a smaller company. It automates a lot of the tasks and lets us focus in on building out our own solution. It's quicker, there is less building of manual solutions, and less downtime.

It allows our developers to quickly develop, get provisioning done, de-provisioning, etc; the stuff that you would expect to be able to make it streamlined.

The most valuable feature is the Extensibility Framework.

It also lets us automate a lot of the mundane tasks that we would do manually, and keep them consistent and repeatable.

One of the first things that you'll see in 7.5 is that they improved on the user-interface: being able to filter on stuff, having a cleaner interface, and easy navigation.

In terms of room for improvement, customer education is number one. It has nothing to do with the product itself but it would help if there were an understanding of its limitations, or the fact that it is a framework, that it is extensible and that you're not getting everything out-of-the-box. What you are getting is the framework out-of-the-box. Knowing that, you're going to look to either build your own custom solutions or you're going to go to companies like ours and get a solution that is already supported and maintained, so you can focus on your company's main mission.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues with it. Being a VMware partner, we usually provide feedback to their product management team. But on the whole, it's pretty stable.

It can definitely scale, from a smaller company like ours, all the way up to a large company like VMware, Dell EMC. It works great either way.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we just did an upgrade and, while I wasn't directly involved, the overall experience was pretty good. It worked as expected and then we worked with support for any issues that we found during the upgrade process.

Reduction in roll-out time, decreased time to value, is our ROI.

For the most part, it is user-friendly. It continues to grow and mature. It's definitely headed in the right direction. The fact that they continue to want to improve the customer experience is important. The product is great to begin with but they realize that nothing is perfect and they want to keep improving it.

vRNI taught us to troubleshoot issues and help us implement our NSX product. Therefore, it's been one of the most valuable tools of the product.

We're in a huge NSX implementation right now and trying to understand each application. vRNI's been very helpful in helping us protect each one of those applications.

They are already working on it, which is really nice. It would be the capability of actually identifying certain applications, like SQL, file servers, DNS, AD servers, and making it easier to identify those types of systems.

Stability for vRNI - it just works. We haven't had any issues with it.

The scalability is great. We haven't had any issues with the capability of the machines, NSX, or with the implementations of both.

Personally, I have not called technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We had an inner engagement, and their engineers highly recommended using the tool, as far as the implementation for NSX.

Before this, we weren't using another solution at all. We're pretty much using VMware for this type of environment.

Support is very important, to be available especially for issues that may be new with the features which we're trying to implement. We tend to request support quite a bit, so support is definitely very important.

I would definitely advise, especially healthcare companies that need to secure their products, NSX using vRNI as their tool. To implement it, I would highly recommend that they invest the time to learn how to use vRNI.

I use it to monitor and log the traffic for our virtual servers. We are migrating our virtual servers into a new software-defined data center from a legacy infrastructure. When I migrate the reports into the new infrastructure, I use vRealize Network Insight to monitor or log the traffic from the servers and implement those reports into the NSX firewall. Therefore, our servers will be ready for our migration into our new data center.

We now have a lot less administration after implementing the new service or removing an old system from our new software-defined data center. It has removed investigation time into ports and server traffic on virtual machines. Thus, it saves time.

Network and management is so much better within this solution and the whole software-defined network when we use NSX. I also manage the NSX firewall which flags the security in NSX. A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines.

I can see the network traffic which is being used by the servers that we are going to move into our new data center. This avoids an investigation and asking administrators of the system which ports they need open, since I am able to see it beforehand (before I move the servers) and implement all firewall routes.

I use the flowchart to see the network flows which are going in and out of the servers. I export this information into an Excel worksheet and remove common traffic ports, which we are implementing for every virtual machine.

The solution is very intuitive. I know junior consultants who easily use it and don't have much experience. 

I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this. Right now, I am not getting the result I want. So, I want to see the timeline two weeks back from now, including all the flows. I haven't figured out how to do this. If this is not possible now, maybe in the next release, as this would be a very nice function for me.

It has never been unstable nor gone down.

It suits us perfectly and scales with our departments.

I have no personal experience working with technical support.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was good. They implemented our entire software-define data center.

We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective.

It's a great solution.

You do need knowledge and understanding of network traffic, protocols, and ports to understand when you do a search, since you receive flowcharts about the ports in use. This is more technical knowledge of how your network works. However, the tool is very much intuitive.

We use it for networking and it has performed well.

It helps pinpoint, in the logs and the like, what we need for analyzing and for troubleshooting. It has also provided us with deep visibility.

• Monitoring
• Tracking

It's also intuitive and user-friendly. The screen looks exactly the same as the other appliances for VMware, so it's easy to navigate.

I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards.

It hasn't caused any problems so it's pretty stable.

We haven't scaled yet so we don't know about the scalability yet.

The network team has had to call technical support a couple times. The help they got was great.

We switched to this solution after it was suggested by my TAM.

In terms of selecting a vendor, we have a very stringent vetting process. Thank God, VMware was one of them that met the criteria. It was a no-brainer.

I was involved in the setup in terms of deploying the OVA files. It was straightforward.

We have seen ROI by using it. We used to use a few tools combined to get to what we're getting by using this solution now. We don't have to pay as much support, we don't have to buy three or four tools to do what we need done.

For me, it was a no-brainer because we would like to integrate everything with VMware. I hate to go to another supplier, use another tool, to do the same thing.

I would definitely endorse the solution.