Cisco Intersight vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Cisco is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.3, while VMware is ranked #23 with an average rating of 8.8. Cisco holds a 2.0% mindshare in IM, compared to VMware’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Cisco Intersight

Read 15 Cisco Intersight reviews

2,502 Views
2,005 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

Read 46 vRealize Network Insight reviews

848 Views
509 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Cisco Intersight

vRealize Network Insight

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

vRealize Network Insight and Cisco Intersight compete in the enterprise network management and cloud management categories. While vRealize is noted for its strong network insight capabilities, Cisco Intersight appears to have an advantage in comprehensive cloud management with its hybrid capabilities.

Features: vRealize Network Insight provides comprehensive log analysis across hypervisors and virtual servers, network visualization, and aids in network troubleshooting and microsegmentation. It excels in tracking data flows and optimizing firewall rules. Cisco Intersight integrates cloud management with hybrid capabilities, supports Kubernetes, and offers detailed insights into data center operations.

Room for Improvement: vRealize Network Insight needs better integration, more intuitive interfaces, and improved support for third-party products, with pricing and advanced analytics being areas of concern. Cisco Intersight users desire expanded automation, improved hybrid cloud management, and deeper integration with non-Cisco products.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vRealize Network Insight is primarily deployed on-premises, praised for intuitive setup with strong VMware technical support, though initial challenges are noted. Cisco Intersight supports on-premises, public, and hybrid clouds, providing flexibility. Its technical support is well-regarded but could benefit from more in-depth assistance across platforms.

Pricing and ROI: vRealize Network Insight is considered costly but offers significant ROI through reduced troubleshooting and optimized deployments. Cisco Intersight, while expensive, provides value with competitive pricing and no extra fees for basic monitoring, ensuring efficient data center management and streamlined operations.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Intersight vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Intersight vs. vRealize Network Insight

April 2025

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Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (11th)

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (23rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

ItzikLiberman

System Presale at Bezeq

Provides data center management and full infrastructure visibility

Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management. It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure. We have visibility to other products and storages, some networking. It is also valuable for its integration capabilities with other products.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability."

"The product has good integration."

"Intersight can validate our environment."

"Overall, I rate Cisco Intersight a ten out of ten."

"I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it."

"I like Intersight because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud because Intersight is the IO module."

"Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure."

"This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool."

More Cisco Intersight pros

"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."

"I find that the interface of most VMware products is very similar, which I consider an advantage due to its ease of use compared to other tools like Splunk."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable."

"The automation collects all the relationships between servers, allowing us to visualize these relationships and organize the migration into waves."

"The most valuable feature is the profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation... It has made the migration to NSX much easier. Most of the sys admins within the smaller silos, they have no idea what ports are needed to run their stuff at all. I am pretty sure the micro-segmentation would never, ever have occurred without it."

"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. 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."

"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."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"It's a very complex solution."

"Technical support from Cisco has been mixed. For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX."

"I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight."

"Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs. The high initial cost is a significant concern."

"The solution needs some enhancement in order to build the cluster in two nodes."

"There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment."

"The product's setup should be easier."

"In the future, the solution needs to plan on an extension to cover a broader range of objects since, at present, there are some Cisco devices within the range of Intersight UCS that it can't manage."

More Cisco Intersight cons

"There are some random glitches in the Web UI, but they are usually pretty cosmetic in nature. I don't really seem to use any browser other than Chrome with it. I also get some weird errors from time to time on the hardware NetFlow Collectors, where it doesn't sync data."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I would like to see application identification. That would be cool."

"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."

"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."

"The product is cost-effective."

"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."

"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

"It has brought more money into our company."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

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

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

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

35%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?

Intersight can validate our environment.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?

I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?

We use Cisco Intersight ( /products/cisco-intersight-reviews ) for operational tasks. We run patches and import firmware updates from the Cisco site. In the event of a component failure, such as a ...

See all answers

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cisco UCS Manager vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 46% of the time

HPE OneView vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 8% of the time

Dell CloudIQ vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 5% of the time

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ThousandEyes vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 18% of the time

DX NetOps vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 15% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 14% of the time

DX Spectrum vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 11% of the time

ManageEngine OpManager vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Intersight

May 2025

Download Cisco Intersight product report

Buyer's Guide

vRealize Network Insight

April 2025

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

Intersight

Arkin

Overview

Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

Cisco

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Intersight vs. vRealize Network Insight

April 2025

Free Report: Cisco Intersight vs. vRealize Network Insight

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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