vRealize Network Insight Reviews

We use it for network troubleshooting, to provide some capacity reports, and to help generate rules for NSX microsegmentation.

It allows me to really represent network data in a way that management, and non-network engineers, can understand. That makes it easier for me to make my point.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data, whether it originates from the VMware host or from the harbor host.

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. It continues to improve, but I'd like to see better support for hardware stuff.

It's pretty stable. There are some random glitches in the Web UI, but they are usually pretty cosmetic in nature. I don't really seem to be able to use any browser other than Chrome with it. I also get some weird errors from time to time on the hardware NetFlow Collectors, where it doesn't sync data. 

But overall, it's pretty reliable and what I need is in there and its miles ahead of what we had before. So the above are not really complaints, more just observations. It's been getting better since we first deployed it when was on 3.23.4, and we're on 3.8 now.

It's really easy to upgrade. We did have one issue during one upgrade, I believe it was the 3.7, where it was just a bad patch and the upgrade went sideways.

I have it deployed across four vCenters, four proxy VMs. It seems to take up an awful a lot of resources, but it seems to scale pretty well. We added an entire environment to it and it didn't seem to have any problems with that at all. It adjusted the data very quickly, and I can find what I need really fast.

I have used the technical support and technical support was awesome. They got done what I needed done, without any hassle. They called me up, said, "We got it fixed." It was great.

We used a combination of legacy netflow products, some freeware and the like.

My criteria for selecting a vendor include: is it somebody we already have a relationship with? Do I have to go through the vendor selection process on my end? Is it providing a compelling enough use case to warrant the effort we need to be able to go after it? At a high level, does it fit needs that we have today? What's it going to allow us to get done?

The project workload I have is so high that if it doesn't help me with my day-to-day work, or answer questions or solve a problem, I just don't have time for nice-to-have things. Network Insights has been pretty critical, helping me out. I'm working on so many projects running the business that I need all the help I can get with that. It's been great.

It was a super easy setup. I deployed it myself in about an hour, and I have been working with it ever since. We deployed it, initially, for an assessment and then we turned on the demo license and I said, "Okay this is awesome", and we bought it.

It's incredibly powerful for how easy it was to set up.

The value that I have seen is that I spend less time troubleshooting the same problems. It has insight into the virtual environment and the hardware environment, so I'm able to trace problems fairly quickly. I can turn around to a ticket and say, "No it's not the network, here's the graph, this is why". That enables me to get back into project work, which is mostly security, and that benefits the business a lot. It takes a lot off my plate.

We looked at some Netscout stuff but it just wasn't working out. We looked at Cisco Tetration Analytics instead but it wasn't giving us what we wanted.

There is not an easier way to do this. If you have unlimited time, maybe go look at something else. But if you don't, then this is would be the way to do it.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's a fantastic product, it's great. Some of the things I think it should be able to search on, it doesn't. I would also like to see tighter integration with some logging and SNMP-type information. I also use Splunk so I'd like to see something with Splunk. I know it can do vRealize Log Insight but that doesn't seem to do a whole lot for me yet. I only gave it a nine because I know there's so much more potential there. I would tell anybody "Get it". I rated it very highly but there's a lot more potential and room to grow.

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. 

We are attempting to discover legacy network transactions and convert them to micro-segmentation rules with NSX-T.

It hasn't improved the way our organization functions, yet. It's only been in for two or three months and we're still trying to figure out the best way to pull the data out so that we can start building those firewall rules. But we anticipate that, once that time comes, it will cut massive amounts of time in the process of building those rules.

The most valuable feature for me is the different views that you can get when selecting an application or a VLAN. It shows you the traffic flows. It gives you a visual representation of something that, in text, just may not make as much sense.

That is valuable to me because, from my perspective, I don't own any of the applications, so I don't know how they would communicate normally. This gives me a little insight into which servers interact with what else in the environment and it helps me to maintain them in a more appropriate manner. I can see who's tied to what, and whether or not they're critical.

It's also user-friendly. It's similar to the GUI that most VMware products are moving to, and the consistency across those makes it easy to switch from one product to another. Also, the search bar at the top is plain text and it helps you, it guides you along with your search query, and that helps. The first day you're in there you can start building actual queries.

When we talk about those micro-segmentation rules, there's an Export function. It is very macro-segmentation oriented instead. So if you choose an application, it will find the tiers within that application and say that it's communicating on, say, port 80 to a separate VLAN. There might be 200 machines in that other VLAN. You don't want to open port 80 at all of them. So we need a lot more granularity in those suggested firewall rules. It's a good start, but it's still going to require a lot more work on our side to actually make it a real rule, instead of what it's trying to do with the macro rule.

I would like to see better micro-segmentation rules. That's key for me. That's our primary use case for it at this point. We might add others in the future but, at this point, that's what we need, and we're not quite getting it.

It has been rock solid. We have never had an issue with stability.

We haven't had to scale it, which is surprising, because with almost all of the other VMware products that we use, we have scalability issues. This solution seems to handle it better than most of their other products.

Tech support has been great. We even get access to the BU when we have questions about the API. We're very satisfied with it. 

We did not have a previous solution. We have a project to migrate from legacy networks into NSX-T. This solution was installed to facilitate that move, so that we can get there. It was recommended by our VMware TAM Services and by some of the engineers who were working for NSX-T.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are access to information, whether it's documentation, knowledge-base articles, or tech support; and stability. There is nothing more frustrating than having to touch the product frequently to make sure that it's up and running for you.

The initial setup was very easy. The deployment is just OVAs and it is really small, really fast to deploy. Just make 'em talk to each other and everything's happy.

If we can get it to provide those firewall rules it will literally save hundreds of man-hours, if not thousands of man-hours. So the ROI would be huge. But we're not quite there. When we get there, I anticipate the ROI will be much better.

I want to say it's a 10 out of 10. If they fix that micro-segmentation thing it will absolutely be a 10. Right now it's about an eight out of 10. I think it's just a big jump. If they can fix that micro-seg, that means so much more to me, so I would give it that extra boost for that. But the usability of it, how nice the interface is, those are great. If they improve the API that might get us to a nine, but if they get the micro-seg, I'll give them the other two points.

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.

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. 

We used it for our VDI solution to track down all of the network beginning and endpoints.

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.

It also sped up our time to value. It brought the time it took to implement way down to a number of days, instead of a number of weeks.

The most valuable feature for us is that insight into what our network is really doing - it's a fairly complex network. Not having to go through thousands of lines of network configuration to find firewall ports that were open or closed, for various ports, was very valuable.

It went out and found everything we need very quickly. It did everything we needed it to do.

After you use it for a little while you become accustomed to it but the layout doesn't feel very intuitive. You have to dig around and find the exact place where you can find the information, where you can actually see your east-west traffic, etc. 

I would like them to bring that information more to the forefront, instead of having to find it.

Once you have learned how to use everything, it becomes easy to use.

It was very stable. In bringing it up we did not have any issues.

I have not been able to get an accurate impression of the scalability. We only use it across one network. It's a large network, so it seems to have scaled for that. I don't know how it would scale for something even larger than what we have currently.

We actually had a technician on site. He was very quickly able to get with the other levels of technical support to get answers for us to any questions he was not able to answer.

We ended up going with VMware and a VDI solution and this product was a recommendation alongside of that. We looked at it and it looked like it would do the job.

The initial setup was very easy to do. But we did have the technician there, walking us through the whole process. He was familiar with it. But it was not that difficult of a setup.

We have not had the opportunity to upgrade to a newer version.

It prevented us from having to spend about $5,000,000 on new desktops and laptops. It cut that down to about a quarter of that price.

Because it looked like it would do the job, we didn't look at anything else.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. I might give it a higher rating if we used it more. We used it for a period of time and then we stopped using it. There was nothing wrong with it, we just didn't use it enough to see it as a 10 out of 10.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is finding one who will actually give what is promised.

For this product, we wanted to introduce NSX into our environment. Previously, we were using all Cisco, so we wanted to try Network Insight to find the vulnerabilities in our environment and whether our environment was compatible with NSX. That was the premier objective in using this product.

It improves efficiency. Sometimes, to implement a project we have a bottleneck which takes a lot of time in dealing with the network team. But now, with NSX deployed and Net Insight there, we can troubleshoot any issues proactively. It helps us get things deployed very quickly.

It has reduced time to value.

We see about a 20 - 25 percent increase in performance, because of this solution.

In terms of more easily managing networks and improving the visibility, that's the best side of this product, and we're enjoying it. It helps us to manage the network easily.

It gives us the workflow. If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved.

It's very intuitive. The GUI is very effective. It's a very good product, it's very easy to explore.

Log Insight from VMware is similar to what Network Insight does. If it had some kind of plugins with vSphere, more effective plugins with Horizon View or other VMWare products, if it had interconnectivity, I think it would be more effective than it is today.

It's stable.

We can add more appliances. It's easily scalable.

Initially, we had to use a lot of technical support because nobody had much expertise. But eventually, we developed expertise. We had to call support to get things done. Now, if there are any complex issues, we get into support calls.

We have upgraded it, we applied one patch. It was easy because it's appliance-based, so we just got the pack and uploaded it.

We have ROI data, but it's confidential so I cannot disclose it. But overall, we have had a very good experience. We have had a good return on investment on this. It's a very good product.

Cost-wise it's reasonable, maybe because we have all VMware products under one umbrella, so they have given us a good discount. But overall, it's very efficient and rich in features.

We considered Cisco and we considered some other small vendors, as well as Palo Alto. But eventually, because we are a VMware shop and our entire team was working with VMware, we went with this product.

I rate it a nine out of ten. I'm a little bit skeptical, I never give a ten. But otherwise, in the next release, if they made it more intuitive - it's definitely intuitive - but if there were some more features and it let us know about east-west traffic as well, that would be more helpful.

The primary use is to identify different types of traffic that are in the network and identify what policies we need to apply to meet our security requirements.

The performance has been excellent.

It has definitely helped us to meet compliance rules by assuring that all traffic is going to where it's supposed to go. It can be used to report that you are in compliance, as well as helping you get into compliance. We use it on an ongoing basis to show our clients in our cloud that traffic is not going to them that isn't supposed to be. We have customers that have to be assured that our environment is safe for them, and it gives them that confidence, that knowledge. We retain customers longer.

It has reduced time to value for sure because it would be very hard to do this any other way. We would have to sniff packets, and that's just very labor intensive.

It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way.

To monitor the network flows, all you have to do is install it. It has an OVA that you deploy to vCenter, and then it will sit there, and it will listen on the network, and it will catch traffic within the virtual environment.

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.

Reporting could be a little bit smoother. I would like it to be more intuitive to create a report that would automatically send stuff out on a periodic basis; for a management-oversight reports and the like. You can probably do that right now, I just haven't figured it out in the interface yet.

It's very stable. The way that it deploys and the way that it performs, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

I don't know that I can speak to the issue of scalability, to a giant enterprise level, but we have quite a few servers in our farm, and virtual machines, and it has scaled well to that.

My experience with technical support has been very good. The amount of time it takes for them to get back to you truly depends on each incident. For me, it wasn't an emergency situation, so it took a couple of days. But if we do have a situation where something is down, then they get back to us immediately.

In term of customer service, we are a VMware partner, so we get different customer service than other people do, but ours is very good.

There wasn't really anything similar to this before. We knew that there were things going on, but we really couldn't tell. We didn't know how to get at it and, when we found this solution, it was a no-brainer that we were going to try it. They give you a trial version on it so you can see if it's going to be of value to you before you purchase it. It showed its value right away. This solution came to us. We weren't actively searching for it at that particular time.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, for us, are that 

• we know the vendor has been around
• we have confidence in them
• they have a good support system.

We are always going to have issues with products, so if they can help us overcome those issues, then we're much happier with the product.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's set-it-and-forget-it.

Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it.