vRealize Network Insight Reviews

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.

It's not just on the networking side that we use it. We use vRealize products in our product data, in developing software, as a managed cloud provider. We use vRealize Network Insight as part of our product, which can later be used by the support team to check all the problems which are arising in the network itself. We use software-defined networking, SDN. That's one reason we are using it.

In terms of its performance, we are still in a beta version of our product itself. We are not using it greatly in production yet but we will be using it in two or three months, down the line. There are network flows that we need to know about, if there are any anomalies in the network itself - depending upon the network that our team has deployed. That's the reason we use the vRNI tool, to look into all these parameters.

We also use it for a few performance parameters, depending upon if there are any configuration issues in the network that we have deployed. vRNI has given us a few recommendations on how we can actually set up our firewalls.

It saves us on our SLA times because we are getting directly to the troubleshooting points. That is one of the main things that we are benefiting from. Whenever we have problems with our environment, we are able to solve them a bit sooner than we might otherwise have been able to. These benefits are directly connected to monetary benefits. It has helped to reduce time to value.

While increased performance depends upon what we are using in our networks, Network Insight is more towards how we actually see the entire network as a whole. Performance is mostly determined by what physical parts we are using in the network. While vRNI does not exactly increase the performance, we can better use the network we do have.

Finally, it provides deep visibility.

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.

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.

It is quite stable. We haven't had any downtime with it.

We have not tried to scale it yet.

The implementation is quite straightforward. We were able to go ahead and install it with the plans and recommendations that were provided.

We have also upgraded it. There are two proxy platform VMs when it comes to Network Insight. In the newer versions what I discovered is that you can directly install it through the UI, so it's a little automated. In the older versions, we had to do it from the CLI. So this is a new feature in it.

I would recommend the product. I don't think there is any other product like this on the market right now.

I rate this product at seven out of ten because the product is great but there are still a few more improvements that can be made to it, as I said above. It could have more physical devices integrated and supported.

When selecting any type of vendor, our most important criteria is support.

We want to use it for the basics, checking out traffic flows. One of the main reasons we got it was that we have a new mobile application, and we'd like to track all the traffic between the different layers: DMZ layer, database layer, app layer.

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

It's pretty much user-friendly, but it could always be friendlier. Anything that would make it easier would be helpful.

So far, it has been pretty stable.

As far as I know, the scalability is good.

We have not had to use technical support yet.

Make sure you check out the demo, make sure you have enough time to check out the demo, run it in your environment for a while, and study up as much as you can on it.

The primary use case is for tracking flows within the data center and it has worked very well.

It has given us much better insight into how we're deploying and how we perform after we deploy. It has also definitely helped to reduce time to value, and definitely helped provide deep visibility.

We tend to rely on vROps for the monitoring aspect, the performance piece of it, but that's because we're particularly focused on capacity right now. I expect to run the two in parallel when we're in a more operational model, where I will have the day-to-day folks deeply involved. Right now, it's still primarily run by engineers.

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.

In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors.

We've had no issues at all with stability. It has been solid.

Scalability is still untested by us.

The team has used technical support, although I am not familiar with the outcomes. We've generally been happy with VMware support across the board, so I can't imagine the experience has been different for this product.

We came to the conclusion that we needed to invest in a new solution by working with the VMware team. It was not an impulsive decision by any means.

The best ROI is "sane deployments." It's not intuitive, but it has actually helped us keep the number of deployments down, and we definitely get placement right the first time much more often.

If you're VMware shop, investigate this deeply because it makes sense to live in the ecosystem.

We use it for networking and it has performed well.

It helps pinpoint, in the logs and the like, what we need for analyzing and for troubleshooting. It has also provided us with deep visibility.

• 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.

I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards.

It hasn't caused any problems so it's pretty stable.

We haven't scaled yet so we don't know about the scalability yet.

The network team has had to call technical support a couple times. The help they got was great.

We switched to this solution after it was suggested by my TAM.

In terms of selecting a vendor, we have a very stringent vetting process. Thank God, VMware was one of them that met the criteria. It was a no-brainer.

I was involved in the setup in terms of deploying the OVA files. It was straightforward.

We have seen ROI by using it. We used to use a few tools combined to get to what we're getting by using this solution now. We don't have to pay as much support, we don't have to buy three or four tools to do what we need done.

For me, it was a no-brainer because we would like to integrate everything with VMware. I hate to go to another supplier, use another tool, to do the same thing.

I would definitely endorse the solution.

For us, it's for a security tool, to analyze flows and network traffic and to try to progress along the path of microsegmentation.

In terms of monitoring network flows, if we're trying to set up microsegmentation rules in our distributed firewall, we'll say, "Okay, let's just start with a case." We'll try to isolate an app, and isolate all the network traffic there. We'll analyze it, validate or do discovery using vRNI, and then set up the appropriate rule.

It has enabled us to set up and do application discovery, as far as network traffic is concerned, and set up the appropriate rules that we need to make sure we're compliant with our security frameworks.

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.

It's somewhat user-friendly but some of the data that's presented is not always clear. But that's like any tool. You just have to get used to using it.

The stability is great. There is no problem with it.

The scalability is fine.

We invested in NSX, so we wanted a tool that would give us visibility into that virtual layer.

When selecting a vendor what's important for us is whether they are able to fulfill the requirements that we have defined in our business case.

There's no real advice. You'll know if you need something like this or not. You don't just purchase it and then hope for the best. You have a use case for it.