vRealize Network Insight Reviews

It's mainly for monitoring so that we can design our NSX firewalls.

Previously, we had no idea how the dataflow worked. We knew how all the applications and servers worked, but we never knew how the dataflow was happening. vRNI provides more insight into the dataflow.

It definitely saves times because we are not using this for performance monitoring and not really for monitoring for troubleshooting.

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.

We just started using it so I don't really know a lot of the features yet.

The stability is good. It has never crashed.

I haven't tried to scale it yet.

We had the VMware Professional Services team when we started with our NSX project. They helped us set this up and familiarized us with how to use it. They were helfpul.

If you have a VMware suite and you are going to use NSX, then I would definitely recommend vRNI.

I rate the solution at eight out of ten. I'm still getting familiar with it. The UI, even though once you get to know it, it's easier, still it's hard to figure out by yourself. You have to go read, watch videos. It has a lot of data on it. So that is an issue.

Our primary use case for the solution is to monitor the end-to-end network aspect of our environment. The performance is really good. We don't have any delays or the like. It gives us really good performance.

vRNI can trace the flow of each and every packet and it is easy for us to troubleshoot all the issues that we do have with the networking. We can trace down the packet to a point where it has been dropped.

It has reduced the time to value, increased performance, and allowed us to more easily manage networks and gain deeper visibility. I see this product as most effective in the troubleshooting area. Every time I try to troubleshoot something it minimizes my troubleshooting time to about one-tenth of what it would otherwise take me.

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.

The compatibility with each and every component of the infrastructure is the main thing that I am looking for. I would like them to make sure that it's compatible with different kinds of storage systems, etc. I have seen the compatibility list. I feel it can be more compatible than it is right now.

It's really stable. I really like it.

We haven't really scaled it across. While we do have it in our production environment, we haven't applied it across the whole infrastructure. We are at a point where we are working on that.

Tech support has been really good. They're really responsive. They'll get onto a WebEx whenever we need them, so it's really good.

I was involved in the initial setup and it's really straightforward. It's not complex at all. Anyone can do it.

If you are having too many issues with your network, having issues with tracing the flow of your network, this is the product you should be using to troubleshoot the issues.

I rate it a nine out of ten. It's not a ten because of the compatibility issue.

We use it to capture the logs from the network and then build and figure out the policies for microsegmentation. In addition, if anything goes down, it captures the logs.

We have it integrated with vCenter and NSX Manager. It captures the logs from there, and then it updates the logs. From there we can figure things out. Also, we can make a bubble and then we can figure out the grouping.

It helps a lot because, until now, we haven't had 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.

It has helped reduce time to value. It helps us to troubleshoot, to know exactly where the problem is.

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.

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. I'm looking for that kind of feature.

Also, while it is user-friendly for the virtual part, it is not as friendly for the physical part.

We have not had any outages, any crashes.

We are using about 400-plus hosts, so it is capable of a big scale. We haven't scaled up beyond that, but it is good.

Technical support is very helpful.

We did not have a previous solution. We just implemented NSX recently, so we just installed vRNI along with that.

For Network Insight, the setup is very straightforward.

I would tell a colleague who is looking into this or a similar solution that vRNI is a great tool because, without it, it would be impossible to manage the operations part.

I rate vRNI at eight out of ten. For the other two points, I would need more regarding the microsegmentation part. It doesn't give me the clarity I want. It captures a lot, but it doesn't give complete clarity. That is something I am looking for.

When looking for a vendor, support is the main criteria.

They have a legacy environment that they're trying to use microsegnmentation on. So the use case is to facilitate that because they don't necessarily know a lot of the firewall rules from the original environment, which was a physical environment. Now that it has gone virtual, they want to use the vRNI to get better firewall rules in there and make it more streamlined.

The main usage of it is microsegmentation and troubleshooting, not real monitoring of the environment, because we have other tools that do the monitoring of the environment. But when it comes down to bringing in new environments and making sure they're microsegmented, it's pretty easy to use for that purpose. No other product is available to do that.

And we use it for troubleshooting because 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.

Right now, since the PoC, in the environment that we're using it on, for troubleshooting any issues that come up, or in the case of the microsegmentation, it's very valuable because it has allowed us to add firewall rules that were specific to what we needed, and not the extra firewall rules that other people thought we needed.

It has allowed us to easily take the physical environment and bring it into virtual and then put together the firewall rules that were needed, not necessarily firewall rules that everybody thought we needed, which were already in the old firewalls. We were able to do that much quicker doing it this way, rather than trying to weed out all the rules that didn't necessarily need to be there.

Troubleshooting-wise, we did have a problem in the environment and it made it easier to find the actual issue, the real issue, not something that we thought was the issue.

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.

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.

It seems to be very stable. I don't know how it's going to be when we go into production. Right now, we have a single instance of it, but in production, it has to be a cluster environment and we haven't really tested that part of it.

When it goes into production, it's going to have to scale from this one, small installation to a much larger installation for our purpose. It seems like it will do it pretty easily, but we won't know until we actually do it.

It was pretty easy to install and the documentation for laying it out seems to be easy to follow, design-wise. It was very straightforward.

We've upgraded four times with it and the upgrading was pretty easy as well.

It could be cheaper, of course.

We're not really comparing it to any other vendors. I don't know of anyone that does microsegmentation and whose solution is integrated within VMware's environment

It's a pretty good system if you're doing troubleshooting and microsegmentation. As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need.

I rate it a seven out of ten, only because it doesn't have all the vendors - at least the switch vendors - in there. They only have Cisco, for the most part, and you really need all of them to make it because companies don't just use Cisco for everything.

Our primary use case is to use it do design and for troubleshooting the future.

We have had the product for three weeks now.

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

It is still in our lab environment.

• Its open design.
• Figure out what's being used in our environment.
• Building roles.

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

It is pretty stable.

The technical support has been good so far.

We've owned NSX for three years and now starting to deploy it, which is why we went with vRNI. We did not even consider another solution to go with it.

The initial setup was simple. It took about an hour.

They are coming onsite in about two weeks.

It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes. 

They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment.

Do the training before purchasing. Research the product and its competitors.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: technical knowledge. They need to understand their product.

We use it for auditing our firewall compliance. For network segmentation, we want to see that we are compliant and that we are staying compliant with the business goals.

We've been using it for about six months and the early work we've been doing with it is promising, it looks good.

It hasn't yet changed the way our organization works, but that's our hope.

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.

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.

It seems stable, it's fine.

We haven't seen any trouble with scalability yet. We haven't done a full deployment, but so far it seems good.

We haven't had to use technical support, and that is good.

We are a heavily compliance-driven, regulatory type of business, so I needed a way to bridge the gap between an operations team that actually does firewall changes and our business stakeholders to see that the changes they made actually met their business requirements. That was the glue that we didn't have before, that was my motivation.

The selection certainly goes hand in hand with NSX, and we're pushing NSX pretty hard. That was a key factor.

The setup was straightforward, it was good. I did it personally and it was easy.

In terms of value, I think we are getting what we paid for. If we can get it into the other use cases I mentioned above, I think the ROI will be quite positive.

Our company did some work with SolarWinds, but they're not quite the same thing. Also, Dell's old Foglight, I don't know if they're still around. That was another one, but it was not really in the same arena. They didn't really do what we wanted.

It's easy enough to try. Get with their account team, get some trial licenses and give it a whirl. It's worth spending a weekend to give it a shot.

It's hard for me to give it a 10 out of 10, it's hard for me to give it a six out of 10, so my rating is in the middle. The only reason I would not give it a nine or a 10 is for cost reasons. It seems to be one of those things that really belongs as part of the product inherently and not as an add-on. That would be my only concern.

Like most companies, we don't necessarily know what ports are necessary for our applications to talk to each other, so we're hoping to get insight on that for increasing our microsegmentation with NSX.

In terms of monitoring network flows, we're just looking specifically at the flows within one VDS, so we can dive down through that VDS and isolate virtual machines. Then it gives us that visualization. We have not moved into the physical side of that at this time.

It's performing very well. We're still going through the learning pains so we haven't quite got out of it most of what we're looking for, yet. We understand that it is in there, we just don't understand how to get it yet.

We're only at the evaluation stage but the benefit we're looking for is to speed the production deployment of the applications in a microsegment environment. We would love to get to that ring of Zero Trust but we're just not there today.

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.

One of the things I've asked about is regarding Log Insight, with their syslog collector. There seems to be a lot of overlap between that and vRNI. I've asked if one of those is going away or if they're moving together and I really haven't been able to get a clear answer. I would like to know that.

It's been very stable. We have not had any problems at all with the deployment.

We haven't made it to the point where we're scaling yet. We haven't hit any performance issues that would cause us to evaluate the scalability.

Technical support is very responsive, knowledgeable, and they're quick to get things done.

We didn't have anything in this space on the virtual side. As we moved deeper into the virtualized world, we lost some of those traditional physical network visibility tools. We were using some of the native NSX visibility tools incorrectly and causing NSX problems, trying to expose that information to our analysts. This was the solution that they gave us that would fix that. I think AppDefense now adds some of that back, but hopefully, they'll work together.

The most important criteria when we're looking at a vendor are

• reliability
• usability.
  

We initially went with what we were using on our traditional memory side, your traditional network monitoring. CA Spectrum is what we use on that side. We've looked at that and some basic netflow monitors.

We would absolutely recommend it. In fact, we've had that experience where it was recommended to us and we said, "We need this, we need to do this."

We are very positive so far with everything we've seen in this tool.

We use it to manage our servers, our virtual vSphere environment. It has performed exceptionally. We're able to get a lot of versatility into our network, into our STDC, with the VMs and the NSX that we also have running.

It has really tightened down the security. That was something that we were lacking.

It has also given us deep visibility into our network. We can really get down and see all of the traffic within the data center, between the VMs, between the applications, database servers, other application servers, web servers. We can identify everything that is communicating, and we can see it all on one product.

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.

I'm not quite sure what features I would like to see in a future release. We haven't explored everything in the product yet. We're able to pull out of it what we need right now.

We haven't had any problems with stability. We pretty much implemented it with a brand new solution - we implemented it at the same time as a data center refresh we just went through. We're really looking to be able to take it to the next level and put some micro-segmentation into our data center and this tool will help us do that.

Scalability has not been an issue at all. Since it's a brand new build, I'm not quite sure yet because we haven't had the need to add additional servers or additional VMs. But I don't anticipate any challenges there.

The technical support has been great. We have vendor support as well as technical support with VMware. We really haven't run into too many challenges with this product at all so I can't say that I've even had to call tech support yet on it. It has been running pretty flawlessly.

We had a previous version of the hardware - I'm not going to say who the vendor was - but we had a previous hardware implementation that had to be pulled out and then we had to bring in a newer version of it because it did not meet our needs.

We went with this solution because I was working with that vendor when they actually made good on the deal and made it more attractive for us to stay with their solution instead of going to bid again.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the ease of working with them. Honesty, communication, obviously. We want them to let us know if there are any pitfalls, anything to give us a heads-up on, we'd like to hear that. We've had some problems in the past with some vendors that didn't disclose everything and that caused some challenges. We are definitely looking to work with vendors that are trustworthy.

The initial setup was very straightforward. A big reason why we come to these shows, like VMworld 2018, is to get some more knowledge and training and talk with the professionals. We worked with VMware on the setup, and with our network engineer and our sysadmins. With their help, it was pretty easy to implement, no challenges there.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It's not a 10 because of our experience with the vendor. I believe the product is a great product and, obviously, the VMware applications that we're using, we have had no issues with them.