vRealize Network Insight Reviews

From the time that it was available, we've been using it for various reasons and it's been proven quite successful in our virtual portfolio products, especially in the VMware environment. While we don't use the solution per se, we do sell it to clients and offer support.

It's normally deployed in the virtual blinds mode, within our customer base. Then we take that as part of one of two of the things we do. We use it as a baseline and an assessment enabler to enable the assessment around the network typology. Users get a lot of value. They can see which application is talking to which application through which virtual machine, through which virtual switches, et cetera. Then users can take that information and meet with the client or their team and then remediate the environment so that it is more optimal. The best traffic routes and flow can be found and optimized. That's two of the typical use cases. One is for assessment and one is for optimization.

Thirdly, users can operationalize their teams or customers so that they can use it themselves going forward.

The analysis part of the network insights is very useful for us and our clients. It gives us the most value. I like it in terms of getting the typology and in terms of learning which application is talking to which application, et cetera. The assessment component is the best part of the feature.

The solution is very much viewer centric and it would be nice if it would transcend just the virtual infrastructure.

Beyond that, I can't speak to any features that may be lacking. I don't work on the product on a personal level. I only get feedback from my engineering team and through them I have a bit of an understanding of the product.

We've been using the solution since inception. 

We haven't had any complaints about the stability of the solution or heard of any issues. None of our clients have mentioned running into bugs or glitches. There haven't been crashes.

I personally haven't tried to scale the solution, so I can't speak to how easy or hard it would be.

Our engineering team has contacted technical support many times. From what I understand, they are very, very good and responsive and usually find the solutions to your problems quite easily.

The initial setup of the solution is very, very straightforward. New users will find it quite simple to set up.

According to our deployment teams, as long as they have the right access to the environment, and they've created the right ports it just takes a couple of hours. The deployment is quite quick.

We are a reseller of VMware. We're known as a principal partner and we have the highest level of partnership agreement an organization can have with VMware.

Our organization is quite a large organization that deals, and we have many various different business units concentrating on specific enterprise applications.

In terms of advice I would give to other companies, my personal opinion is that they shouldn't waste time, especially if they know what they want, and start moving towards a cloud consumption-based environment. Network insight is critical. Without that, you're going to introduce additional latencies and problems into your environment that you don't want. So, as a first step to your cloud journey, you have to have a good view of your network environment - especially with your applications and how they are talking to all the other applications. It is critical. I think it's a must-have.

I'd rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.

We use it to monitor the network, the infrastructure. It's performing well.

If any VMs have an issue or there is a network issue or slowness or something similar, we can take a look at where the problem is being caused. It doesn't matter if it's a physical or virtual switch.

It allows us to see how the network devices function as well as to see network glitches or fluctuations or dropping of packets.

It's easy to use. It's easy to integrate with the existing network infrastructure. My network team is happy with it.

It needs improvement in terms of its efficiency.

It's stable.

We just started to use it, so we really don't know much about the scalability.

Although I wasn't involved in the setup, from what I heard, it was quite straightforward, in terms of configuration, etc.

We just started with it recently. We are still working on it, to get familiar with the product.

The first criterion, when selecting a vendor, should be technical support. Whenever we call, we should get technical support. Support is the main thing.

For us, it's for a security tool, to analyze flows and network traffic and to try to progress along the path of microsegmentation.

In terms of monitoring network flows, if we're trying to set up microsegmentation rules in our distributed firewall, we'll say, "Okay, let's just start with a case." We'll try to isolate an app, and isolate all the network traffic there. We'll analyze it, validate or do discovery using vRNI, and then set up the appropriate rule.

It has enabled us to set up and do application discovery, as far as network traffic is concerned, and set up the appropriate rules that we need to make sure we're compliant with our security frameworks.

We have the real-time updates that we can see, so that's been pretty valuable. The mapping is really good, so that has also been a pretty good feature for us.

It's somewhat user-friendly but some of the data that's presented is not always clear. But that's like any tool. You just have to get used to using it.

The stability is great. There is no problem with it.

The scalability is fine.

We invested in NSX, so we wanted a tool that would give us visibility into that virtual layer.

When selecting a vendor what's important for us is whether they are able to fulfill the requirements that we have defined in our business case.

There's no real advice. You'll know if you need something like this or not. You don't just purchase it and then hope for the best. You have a use case for it.

The way you can view flows inside your network.

We're able to implement intersects using this tool.

Make the GUI easier to use.

I recommend for anyone deploying this solution that you are going to have to get everything to point to that piece of software. So, you get a good rating, thus getting you good data.

It's good. Solid.

It's good.

I haven't used technical support.

We weren't using anything previously. We were going to implement the NSX, so we knew we needed to use this solution.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

In-house.

No one else. Just VMware.

If you are going to implement NSX, it's a great tool. It really helps. The network piece, they should look at that, and see what to do with NSX.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: good support.

Capacity management: the forecasting of capacity.

We are better able to understand our needs for future growth and budgeting purposes.

Price. Honestly, the way it's licensed is challenging.

The stability is good.

So far, it's been okay.

It's been good. They are knowledgeable. We can reach the right person.

As we started moving to more critical applications of this infrastructure, we needed to be able to manage it at a higher level than we had been.

For the most part, it was pretty straightforward. Some of the advanced configurations were a little bit more difficult.

In-house.

We used Microsoft for monitoring solutions as well, then VMware. We chose VM because it's more integrated with what we're trying to do with the infrastructure.

The most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Functionality of the product, it's got to work, then responsiveness of the support.

We want to use it for the basics, checking out traffic flows. One of the main reasons we got it was that we have a new mobile application, and we'd like to track all the traffic between the different layers: DMZ layer, database layer, app layer.

The most valuable feature is being able to easily see the path that the VM traffic is taking, what ports are in use.

It's pretty much user-friendly, but it could always be friendlier. Anything that would make it easier would be helpful.

So far, it has been pretty stable.

As far as I know, the scalability is good.

We have not had to use technical support yet.

Make sure you check out the demo, make sure you have enough time to check out the demo, run it in your environment for a while, and study up as much as you can on it.