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.

At IBM we enable vRealize Network Insight in our mission-critical architecture, so we'll be using vRealize Network Insight to monitor and get deep inside to our networking, including with NSX.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. It can be a bit painful to deploy. Product provides excellent overview across physical and virtual networks in your virtual environment . In large organizations where vSphere / SDDC / Private Cloud deployments have thousands of VMs and network segments that product definitely bring significant benefit in terms of monitoring, troubleshooting and granular details of network deployment and traffic of connected devices (physical or virtual ) and last but not least holistic view of your network domain. 

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.

I would give 7 to 8. There is always room for improvement.

For example:

Deployment process ,Appliance and Proxy VM, is getting configuration done in VM Console. This configuration can definitely be done on web interface (e.g. vROPS) for sake of simplicity and admin sanity.

LDAP / Active Directory integration configuration is not straight forwards as with other products on vRealize portfolio

Roles and User permissions configuration differs from other products, and in scenarios where certain group of individual need to have specific permissions across vRealize products  configuration is not out of the box.

Clustering across Geo locations (Dual Site scenarios or different L2 Domains) or any other mechanism that can provide HA or maintain data availability across sites.

Offering few sizes of deployment would benefit customers that don't have big foot print in on-prem or cloud, but still would like to get the product into their infrastructure, for whatever reason. Current size of the virtual appliance is not suitable for small and medium size environments. 

You can deploy proxy VMs, so it means that if you need to monitor different segments or different deployments of NSX you always can deploy a proxy VM and then monitor those networks within your vRealize Network Insight.

I have never actually had a chance to talk with the technical support about the product, but I assume they are brilliant.

We did not. Since the NSX footprint growth in data centers the majority of the cloud providers who are the companies start looking for something to have more gradual detail on the infrastructure in how the network goes and what the network traffic is, so it's better for troubleshooting, better for holistic overview of your network infrastructure. Before that, we didn't use anything. That's why the troubleshooting was a bit difficult.

It is straightforward. You need to have an IP address. You don't need to do any additional configuration of the appliances, but once you deploy the appliances then you need to do the configuration on the cause-all, which I think it's a bit more not that straightforward and not that intuitive. It could be better to have the initial configuration of the pliers to be over a web interface or some other wizard.

I use it to monitor and log the traffic for our virtual servers. We are migrating our virtual servers into a new software-defined data center from a legacy infrastructure. When I migrate the reports into the new infrastructure, I use vRealize Network Insight to monitor or log the traffic from the servers and implement those reports into the NSX firewall. Therefore, our servers will be ready for our migration into our new data center.

We now have a lot less administration after implementing the new service or removing an old system from our new software-defined data center. It has removed investigation time into ports and server traffic on virtual machines. Thus, it saves time.

Network and management is so much better within this solution and the whole software-defined network when we use NSX. I also manage the NSX firewall which flags the security in NSX. A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines.

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. 

I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this. Right now, I am not getting the result I want. So, I want to see the timeline two weeks back from now, including all the flows. I haven't figured out how to do this. If this is not possible now, maybe in the next release, as this would be a very nice function for me.

It has never been unstable nor gone down.

It suits us perfectly and scales with our departments.

I have no personal experience working with technical support.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was good. They implemented our entire software-define data center.

We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective.

It's a great solution.

You do need knowledge and understanding of network traffic, protocols, and ports to understand when you do a search, since you receive flowcharts about the ports in use. This is more technical knowledge of how your network works. However, the tool is very much intuitive.

The primary scope of vRealize Network Insight is deployment of NSX to visualize north-south and east-west traffic. We mainly use it to implement data on the NSX.

It shows the customer what's going on their network. The product makes it much easier to show the customer the needs of their network virtualization. This is interesting because a network admin thinks they know what's going on in their network, but they don't.

We format the network flows with the customer for certain times. After that, we can see what their needs, sizing, etc.

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.

The virtual appliance has rebooted, but overall, the stability is good.

The initial was straightforward. You can have it up and running in one hour.

It has brought more money into our company.

We show the solution to customers who need to implement NSX or will be moving into the virtualization, because even nowadays, there are still companies which are not virtualized. The graphical interface makes it easier for customers to see the benefits of it.

We also have Cisco customers who use Cisco switches. Cisco has a CLI tool where you can check throughput, performance, etc. 

Use the product. It's pretty cool.

Our primary use case for vRNI is to have an overall dashboard for east-west traffic in our hospital. It is used to catch anomalies, like system which are not being used or being overutilized. Its performance is great.

vRNI has improved our organization mostly through our NSX deployment. When we deployed NSX, we were able to watch the flows and create the rules which are normally unseen. When we are going through an application, we have a list of ports (allow or denied rules in NSX). With vRNI, we are able to watch what is happening. If something is not listed or spec'd out by the vendor, but still necessary, like interfaces or engines, we can catch them without causing downtime to the production application when we implemented NSX.

It definitely helps us manage our network. It provides that deep visibility into what is happening with traffic. You usually don't think of where your traffic is coming from (e.g., this server is connect to that server), but you have your authentication level and other flows that you never even think of. This product helps us with the visualization.

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.

vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX. This was just brought up at the keynote speech.

We are totally stable. Out-of-the-box, it starts running day one. We have not had an issue so far.

As far as scalability, give vRNI disk space and it scales out.

We have not used tech support with vRNI so far. 

I was involved in the initial installation. It was very straightforward and simple: Give it an OVA and IP address and point to the vCenter and switches. 

We have not gone through an upgrade process yet, but I don't think it will be an issue. We will see when we get there.

Our NSX team helped us do the install in the beginning. So far, we haven't had any questions about it since the initial installation.

The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out.

We never even a solution existed until we saw vRNI.

I would rate the vRNI a ten out of ten. It has given us value since day one. We can see more than before. This helps.

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.

Our primary use case for the product is for preparing for NSX deployments, looking at flows between VMs, and to help us troubleshoot also.

It has helped us tremendously to be able to easily deploy NSX in our environment with microsegmentation. It has also helped us with time to value. It has helped with network visibility for sure.

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.

It's kind of hard (to come up with room for improvement) on an almost-perfect product. Room for improvement: Maybe a little more help in regards to when you're searching for something, give me little "help bubbles" about what those terms will help search for.

The product itself is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have used tech support for vRNI for doing upgrades and for deployment considerations, and the experience was fantastic.

I was involved in the original deployment. Very straightforward, very easy to deploy.

The upgrade experience for vRNI is probably one of the easiest out there. You enable a support tunnel, you let them know, and they do it all remotely, and it just works

The ROI for vRNI is, in my opinion, that it especially helps with deploying NSX, that you're not having to manually chase down and figure out what you need to do to microsegment VMs. This gives a nice option where you can say, "Hey, this VM, show me what flows are there." I can export it out and then import it as an NSX rule and job done.

There was nobody else on our shortlist when we chose vRNI.

The rating for the product would be a nine because I don't know of anything that would be a ten. Nothing's perfect.

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 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.

The use case is to get insight into the network, how many resources are being used. We look at the GUI and see what kind of traffic flows are happening east-west, and who is talking to whom, and how much bandwidth is consumed. That can even give us some idea about capacity planning.

It gives the visibility that was either broken or there in pieces only. This solution provides a unified view of the whole system, back and forth. It has helped to reduce time to value, increase performance, more easily manage networks, and provide deep visibility.

• The netflow
• The information flow
• Who is talking to whom, top-talkers
• User-friendly

I would like to see them expand the capabilities to infrastructure types other than just VMware.

So far it has been stable. We are not using it to a stress-test level yet, but it seems stable.

We are not using it at the full-blown scale, but for the limited scale, it works well. It's fast, it's not slowing down.

Technical support has been pretty good.

We used multiple other tools before. And even now, it's all in parallel. We have different tools running in different domains.

This provides a holistic view. The other computer tools provide certain pieces of it. This has a more holistic approach, the big picture.

It's definitely worth investigating. You need to look at the environment, but it's worth the time to look into it and see if it fits with your purposes.