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vRealize Network Insight pros and cons

Vendor: Broadcom

4.3 out of 5

47 reviews
89% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

vRealize Network Insight enables effective network flow monitoring and enhances NSX setup by simplifying port and IP access requirements. It improves troubleshooting through packet flow analysis and provides deep insights into east-west traffic within Layer 3 networks. While offering strong automation for streamlined management, concerns exist regarding third-party interoperability, limited physical switch support, and integration with NSX Manager. Recent Broadcom acquisition impacts support, and cost considerations arise as it's an add-on feature.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

vRealize Network Insight allows users to visualize network flows and monitor communications between servers and applications, providing insight that simplifies microsegmentation and network configuration.

vRealize Network Insight supports network traffic monitoring, including packet tracking and flow analysis, enabling effective network configuration and security management.

vRealize Network Insight offers deep visibility into network traffic, allowing users to see detailed communication patterns within their networks, enhancing compliance and performance tracking.

vRealize Network Insight assists in migrations by providing dependency mapping, reducing outages and troubleshooting needs, and improving network efficiency.

vRealize Network Insight automates network traffic management, assisting companies in saving time and resources while improving network security and performance.

CONS

vRealize Network Insight requires enhanced interoperability with third-party products and brands for better integration.

Microsegmentation rules in vRealize Network Insight need more granularity and should be more readable for effective implementation into NSX Manager.

The current scope of interoperability in vRealize Network Insight between physical switches and other network devices needs expansion to include a broader range of infrastructure components.

Additional application information and enhanced application-aware capabilities in vRealize Network Insight are necessary to facilitate easier network policy understanding and better analytics tracking.

vRealize Network Insight incurs challenges with pricing, particularly in regions where costs are dollar-based, suggesting potential for pricing model improvement.

vRealize Network Insight Pros review quotes

SM

Scott Mathewson

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

Aug 29, 2018

The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well.

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LH

Lemont Henderson

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

Aug 29, 2018

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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BC

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

Aug 29, 2018

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.

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vRealize Network Insight

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SO

Network Administrator at Modern Woodmen of America

Sep 2, 2018

One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data.

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Senior IT Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

We can see everything going on in NSX and get a good picture of our environment.

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MG

MichaelGonzalez

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

Sep 3, 2018

It allows us to go from virtual through NSX, up to the core, and see all of that in one pane of glass, it's pretty easy.

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RS

Infrastructure architect at State of Ohio

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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Network Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

It helps a lot because, until now, we didn't have the tools to figure out the micro level, VM-to-VM kind of traffic; that was not in the current environment. We could not figure out VM-to-VM communication from the other tools. This is the tool which gives us end-to-end transparency.

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

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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vRealize Network Insight Cons review quotes

SM

Scott Mathewson

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

Aug 29, 2018

I would like to see more interoperability on the firewall and low balancer sides.

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LH

Lemont Henderson

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

Aug 29, 2018

It needs to be a little easier to use and to understand the information it's putting out. That would make it more helpful. If you're not a network person you need to understand things like network policies and concepts. If you gave it to a regular admin, it would be nice if it were easier for them to pick up what is going on, understand the flows and whether or not stuff should be talking to each other, as opposed to just port groups and IP addresses.

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BC

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

Aug 29, 2018

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.

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vRealize Network Insight

Free Report: vRealize Network Insight Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about vRealize Network Insight. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

880,685 professionals have used our research since 2012.

SO

Network Administrator at Modern Woodmen of America

Sep 2, 2018

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.

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Senior IT Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

The product is slightly complex use, while still being user-friendly. It could use more training modules, as it is not a straightforward product.

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MG

MichaelGonzalez

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

Sep 3, 2018

The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco.

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RS

Infrastructure architect at State of Ohio

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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Network Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

I want to see more in terms of microsegmentation. As of now, I can see the rules, but they are not in a readable format that I can convert to microsegmentation and can fit into NSX Manager.

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

Sep 5, 2018

While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Network Monitoring Software

Popular Comparisons

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Zabbix vs vRealize Network Insight

Datadog vs vRealize Network Insight

Splunk AppDynamics vs vRealize Network Insight

SolarWinds NPM vs vRealize Network Insight

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