vRealize Network Insight Valuable Features

PB
Private Consultant at Freelance

It depends on the use case. If I'm doing a migration, then dependency mapping is more critical to me than anything else. If I'm trying to ensure efficiency inside my micro-segmentation solution, that's a massive help there.

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Javed Koor - PeerSpot reviewer
VMware Administrator L3 Support at Diyar United Company

The best feature of this application is its ability to capture everything within the same application, as well as capture all the traffic. Essentially, the solution is capable of capturing anything that happens outside of the network port.

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Claudio Sousa - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the application pipeline.

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Buyer's Guide
vRealize Network Insight
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about vRealize Network Insight. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

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AC
System Engineer at Cabela's Incorporated

The most valuable features are the packet trace flow and that the view of the whole environment is deep.

We use the trace flow to monitor each packet. For example, if we have any networking issues, we use the trace flow to follow the packet and find out exactly where it has been dropped and then we try to fix the issue at the place where it has been dropped. That's how we troubleshoot it.

Also, the graphical interface of this environment is so good with all the views, the graphics, and everything in them. It's really easy for me. It doesn't require an engineer to work on it. It's easy enough that anyone can get into the environment and look for issues or look at how communication is going on across the VMs. It's pretty much straightforward.

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NZ
System Engineer Technician at Bechtle

It is the first time that you see what your network traffic is doing, where it's going, and where it's coming from. A customer is usually surprised to see how much data is being transferred from the Internet or to the Internet, but also from the east-west traffic as well. It's very interesting because VMware mainly configures their switches on a CLI-base. 

If you have something you want to investigate further, you can just click on it. Then, you can investigate down to the point where you or the customer says, "That's enough information. I don't want to go any further." That's the intuitive part. We don't have to use any algorithms. It's all configured beforehand, which makes it easy and fun to use.

The solution helps reduce time to value, increase performance, provide deep visibility, and easily manage networks.

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HG
Systems Administration and Applications Delivery Head Africa at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The reports, insights, and add-ons where it's monitoring at a specific time on daily reports. For example, it shows when we can use customized reports at any time for any request raised.


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Salar Mehdi Zadeh - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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SO
Network Administrator at Modern Woodmen of America

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.

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EF
Presales Engineer at Infiniit

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.

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RS
Infrastructure architect at State of Ohio

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.

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AP
Systems Engineer at Mednax

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.

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VA
Corporate FED (forensics and eDiscovery) at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

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

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BC
Staff SYS Admin at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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NR
Senior Consultant at DynTek

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.

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DP
Partner consultant at Sable Computer dba KIS

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.

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JR
Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

What's valuable to us is the ability to get a view into the virtual space, which is something we haven't had before. Before, it was done by collecting from network endpoints and extrapolating into the virtual environment. Now it's coming directly from the virtual environment.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. It makes perfect sense to somebody familiar with the VMware world.

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MG
VMware NSX Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The microsegmentation is valuable, especially for this environment.

Also, the ability to troubleshoot all the way across the NSX part of it to the physical and actually watch the packets go through and then see where the bottleneck is or where the interruption is, is valuable. We run queries on the network flows within the application to find where they are in it and it graphically tells us how the packets are actually going through the system.

It's very user-friendly in the sense that the querying is just regular language like you and I speak or write. You don't need to know any SQL-query type of language to be able to get what you want out of it.

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it_user730434 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Server Engineer at Christus health

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.

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SS
Technical Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dataflow. We tag our virtual machines and then we try to find out the traffic between the web server and app servers, and the traffic between the Dev servers and Prod servers, so that we can build the firewalls around them.

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PS
Enterprise Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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BF
Sys Admin at Aurora Central High School

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.

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BS
Virtualization Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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NA
Product Manager at SovLabs

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.

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SM
SDDC Practice Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The number one most valuable feature is the visualization of the network flows; being able to see them in a very rich, visual way is the most impactful part of it. We use it to monitor network flows in a couple different ways. We use it as an assessment tool to go into customers and look at network flows, then figure out where the applications are talking to each other, how they're talking to each other, what protocols they're speaking on, and what other servers they're connected to from the network. This is very valuable for helping us either plan application migrations or be able to figure out things like distributing firewall rules, etc., so we can easily be able to identify and distribute the firewall within the product, which is primarily what its designed to assist with.

The second most important thing is the segregation of all the different protocols which are in the ports. We are able to identify and analyze each one of these protocols. This is extremely useful when we are talking about applications moving from on-premise to cloud.

It is very user-friendly and intuitive, especially given some of the natural language queries that it allows for. This is one of the benefits of the tool and the dashboarding which comes with the visualization of it. The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well.

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it_user730227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Architect at Cognizant technology solutions

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.

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ZM
Cloud Architect at IBM

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.

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KV
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has its own UI where you can actually see all the problems. It can directly list all the problems that we're having in the network. Not only that, but it also gives us recommendations on how we can troubleshoot issues. That helps us to go to the problem in the network and not look around at a hundred places to actually troubleshoot a single issue. That's one of the most common use cases we have, troubleshooting the problems in our network.

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. 

I also think it is intuitive and user-friendly. I've been using this product for a long time now. If you look at the UI, you see how user-friendly it is. It has a lot of features in it and it has a lot of options that you can go through. Everything that you actually need to know is covered in the product.

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LH
Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product.

In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other.

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OS
Technical Coordinator with 201-500 employees

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. 

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SB
Supervisor of Systems Engineering at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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SA
Virtualization at a university with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.

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it_user730260 - PeerSpot reviewer
Master Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
  • Provides us a map of what's going on - on our network.
  • Allows us to start microsegmentation.
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MR
Sys Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AS
Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
  • The netflow
  • The information flow
  • Who is talking to whom, top-talkers
  • User-friendly
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TS
Network Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I like the automation part. For the network, it can capture the logs and we can do automation from there. We get all the logs whenever we want and it keeps the logs for a month or so, so we can just go in and figure out what the issue was, as much as one month back.

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JG
Principal Architect at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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SD
Executive - Solutions, Engineering and Services at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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MN
Manager, Data Center at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.

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JP
Engineer at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user526068 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The way you can view flows inside your network.

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RL
Senior IT Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Its open design.
  • Figure out what's being used in our environment.
  • Building roles.
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it_user730296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Admin at American century investments

Capacity management: the forecasting of capacity.

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MT
Infrastructure Admin at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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

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Buyer's Guide
vRealize Network Insight
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about vRealize Network Insight. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.