I thought that when we deployed vRealize Network Insight in our environment, we had to wait for four weeks or so for the solution to capture all the traffic in and out from each connected component. Then, we had to extract the data into an Excel format and analyze it. After that, we had to manually enter the data into NSX-T Manager. If there was an integration between vRNI and NSX-T Manager, we could extract all the firewall rules directly from NSX-T Manager. This would reduce the workload in half since we would not have to manually enter the same data into both systems. In my experience, the main purpose of vRNI was to obtain firewall rules for NSX-T Manager. If this was integrated, it would have been much easier, since the documentation work was too much. vRNI captures every traffic in and out, so the file can become huge if we have many components and machines in our environment. Integration would help identify the legitimate ports on vRNI and extract the final rules to push them directly to NSX-T Manager, which would make the task much easier. The only issue we have is that the solution does not always capture the host names. We asked VMware for an explanation and they provided us with some reasons. Ideally, the DNS name should be captured, however, when we extracted the data onto an Excel sheet, we found that around 20 to 30 entries only had IP addresses. Therefore, we had to manually track those IP addresses and then input their hostname and username to identify what the IP address represented. It seems that something may not have captured this part, but there was a reason for it, and that has room for improvement.
