vRealize Network Insight Reviews

We mostly use it for profiling applications. It works quite well.

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.

• The profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation.
• The alerting is quite nice.

It's user-friendly. It's not super intuitive. It's a rather complicated program. It's networking, and networking is relatively complicated. But it does a really good job of displaying the relationships between things.

They can always build upon it and add more stuff, but as it stands right now, it's perfectly fine.

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

I've never had any issues with it. It's up and running all the time.

I've not had to try scaling it at all. The standard sizing, so far, has been more than sufficient.

Technical support has been responsive. The response has always been immediate. Whether or not they've fixed it immediately is a different story. Most of the things I've come to them with have needed some investigation and took a week or so.

The initial setup was trivial.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it to a newer version several times. It has actually improved over time. It's much easier now. You can now just upgrade with the GUI. A single click of a button and off it goes. Before, you had to download all the packages and then manually SFTP them to the server and manually hit the install.

This was really the only solution that provided the features that we were looking for.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is whether or not we think they're going to survive for more than the next license cycle.

I would rate this solution a strong nine out of 10. It would be a 10 if it were free.

We actually write a plugin for vRA that allows customers to integrate with third-party vendors, such as IPAM solutions, DNS, SolarWinds, BlueCat, Infoblox, and about 30 other modules. We both use vRNI and build for it.

It has been performing really well.

We're a smaller company. It automates a lot of the tasks and lets us focus in on building out our own solution. It's quicker, there is less building of manual solutions, and less downtime.

It allows our developers to quickly develop, get provisioning done, de-provisioning, etc; the stuff that you would expect to be able to make it streamlined.

The most valuable feature is the Extensibility Framework.

It also lets us automate a lot of the mundane tasks that we would do manually, and keep them consistent and repeatable.

One of the first things that you'll see in 7.5 is that they improved on the user-interface: being able to filter on stuff, having a cleaner interface, and easy navigation.

In terms of room for improvement, customer education is number one. It has nothing to do with the product itself but it would help if there were an understanding of its limitations, or the fact that it is a framework, that it is extensible and that you're not getting everything out-of-the-box. What you are getting is the framework out-of-the-box. Knowing that, you're going to look to either build your own custom solutions or you're going to go to companies like ours and get a solution that is already supported and maintained, so you can focus on your company's main mission.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues with it. Being a VMware partner, we usually provide feedback to their product management team. But on the whole, it's pretty stable.

It can definitely scale, from a smaller company like ours, all the way up to a large company like VMware, Dell EMC. It works great either way.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we just did an upgrade and, while I wasn't directly involved, the overall experience was pretty good. It worked as expected and then we worked with support for any issues that we found during the upgrade process.

Reduction in roll-out time, decreased time to value, is our ROI.

For the most part, it is user-friendly. It continues to grow and mature. It's definitely headed in the right direction. The fact that they continue to want to improve the customer experience is important. The product is great to begin with but they realize that nothing is perfect and they want to keep improving it.

The primary use is to identify different types of traffic that are in the network and identify what policies we need to apply to meet our security requirements.

The performance has been excellent.

It has definitely helped us to meet compliance rules by assuring that all traffic is going to where it's supposed to go. It can be used to report that you are in compliance, as well as helping you get into compliance. We use it on an ongoing basis to show our clients in our cloud that traffic is not going to them that isn't supposed to be. We have customers that have to be assured that our environment is safe for them, and it gives them that confidence, that knowledge. We retain customers longer.

It has reduced time to value for sure because it would be very hard to do this any other way. We would have to sniff packets, and that's just very labor intensive.

It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way.

To monitor the network flows, all you have to do is install it. It has an OVA that you deploy to vCenter, and then it will sit there, and it will listen on the network, and it will catch traffic within the virtual environment.

It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network.

Reporting could be a little bit smoother. I would like it to be more intuitive to create a report that would automatically send stuff out on a periodic basis; for a management-oversight reports and the like. You can probably do that right now, I just haven't figured it out in the interface yet.

It's very stable. The way that it deploys and the way that it performs, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

I don't know that I can speak to the issue of scalability, to a giant enterprise level, but we have quite a few servers in our farm, and virtual machines, and it has scaled well to that.

My experience with technical support has been very good. The amount of time it takes for them to get back to you truly depends on each incident. For me, it wasn't an emergency situation, so it took a couple of days. But if we do have a situation where something is down, then they get back to us immediately.

In term of customer service, we are a VMware partner, so we get different customer service than other people do, but ours is very good.

There wasn't really anything similar to this before. We knew that there were things going on, but we really couldn't tell. We didn't know how to get at it and, when we found this solution, it was a no-brainer that we were going to try it. They give you a trial version on it so you can see if it's going to be of value to you before you purchase it. It showed its value right away. This solution came to us. We weren't actively searching for it at that particular time.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, for us, are that 

• we know the vendor has been around
• we have confidence in them
• they have a good support system.

We are always going to have issues with products, so if they can help us overcome those issues, then we're much happier with the product.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's set-it-and-forget-it.

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.

We are attempting to discover legacy network transactions and convert them to micro-segmentation rules with NSX-T.

It hasn't improved the way our organization functions, yet. It's only been in for two or three months and we're still trying to figure out the best way to pull the data out so that we can start building those firewall rules. But we anticipate that, once that time comes, it will cut massive amounts of time in the process of building those rules.

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.

That is valuable to me because, from my perspective, I don't own any of the applications, so I don't know how they would communicate normally. This gives me a little insight into which servers interact with what else in the environment and it helps me to maintain them in a more appropriate manner. I can see who's tied to what, and whether or not they're critical.

It's also user-friendly. It's similar to the GUI that most VMware products are moving to, and the consistency across those makes it easy to switch from one product to another. Also, the search bar at the top is plain text and it helps you, it guides you along with your search query, and that helps. The first day you're in there you can start building actual queries.

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. It's a good start, but it's still going to require a lot more work on our side to actually make it a real rule, instead of what it's trying to do with the macro rule.

I would like to see better micro-segmentation rules. That's key for me. That's our primary use case for it at this point. We might add others in the future but, at this point, that's what we need, and we're not quite getting it.

It has been rock solid. We have never had an issue with stability.

We haven't had to scale it, which is surprising, because with almost all of the other VMware products that we use, we have scalability issues. This solution seems to handle it better than most of their other products.

Tech support has been great. We even get access to the BU when we have questions about the API. We're very satisfied with it. 

We did not have a previous solution. We have a project to migrate from legacy networks into NSX-T. This solution was installed to facilitate that move, so that we can get there. It was recommended by our VMware TAM Services and by some of the engineers who were working for NSX-T.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are access to information, whether it's documentation, knowledge-base articles, or tech support; and stability. There is nothing more frustrating than having to touch the product frequently to make sure that it's up and running for you.

The initial setup was very easy. The deployment is just OVAs and it is really small, really fast to deploy. Just make 'em talk to each other and everything's happy.

If we can get it to provide those firewall rules it will literally save hundreds of man-hours, if not thousands of man-hours. So the ROI would be huge. But we're not quite there. When we get there, I anticipate the ROI will be much better.

I want to say it's a 10 out of 10. If they fix that micro-segmentation thing it will absolutely be a 10. Right now it's about an eight out of 10. I think it's just a big jump. If they can fix that micro-seg, that means so much more to me, so I would give it that extra boost for that. But the usability of it, how nice the interface is, those are great. If they improve the API that might get us to a nine, but if they get the micro-seg, I'll give them the other two points.

We are able to analyze application flows through the network.

It is performing very well. It allows us to do a quick analysis of protocols, applications, and network pathing for our customers, then it has them analyze their needs for working application availability.

It's very hard to find anything that works this well.

There are two different benefits that we derive out of the tool:

1. The assessment-based approach: When we go in to do services work or we are trying to understand sizing, what we need to deploy from an NSX perspective is an assessment tool. This helps us be very narrow and specific-focused. It allows us to assess and give quotes back very quickly. 
2. We use it in our services practice. Before we go and do any type of NSX services engagement, we use this tool on the customer's site to look at the environment and figure out some of our scoping and how we will scope our services. It allows us to be more efficient and pinpoint around the use case and actual solution.

The number one most valuable feature is the visualization of the network flows; being able to see them in a very rich, visual way is the most impactful part of it. We use it to monitor network flows in a couple different ways. We use it as an assessment tool to go into customers and look at network flows, then figure out where the applications are talking to each other, how they're talking to each other, what protocols they're speaking on, and what other servers they're connected to from the network. This is very valuable for helping us either plan application migrations or be able to figure out things like distributing firewall rules, etc., so we can easily be able to identify and distribute the firewall within the product, which is primarily what its designed to assist with.

The second most important thing is the segregation of all the different protocols which are in the ports. We are able to identify and analyze each one of these protocols. This is extremely useful when we are talking about applications moving from on-premise to cloud.

It is very user-friendly and intuitive, especially given some of the natural language queries that it allows for. This is one of the benefits of the tool and the dashboarding which comes with the visualization of it. The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well.

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

I like that you can integrate in Palo Alto networks. There is Cisco switching in there as well. We can see the actual path tracing through these products. I would like to add in there any other integrations from a services perspective, such as Big-IP F5 and some other APIs. Palo Alto has a little bit of an advantage, which is fine, but it would be great to see a little bit more integration, especially on the GUI side when we are tracking about some of that pack and flow. It would be great to be able to see other vendors be integrated into the product as well.

We have never experienced any downtime with this product.

We typically have been using it in medium-sized businesses, so we haven't scaled it out to thousands. We have small customers and a couple customers who we do larger amounts in the thousands. However, for us, it's in the hundreds VMs and/or hosts, and we have had no issues at that level. We have been able to scale horizontally and vertically.

It's controller-based and VM-based. It takes a couple different VMs to run it, and it seems to be covering all the scale that we need.

We use our channel resources. Therefore, we have Channel Sales Engineers and Core SEs, then we also have NSX Channel SEs. If we run into problems, and things are not working right or we are getting a display that we're not familiar with, we typically use our resources. Thus, we don't typically call into the general VMware support.

We have an assessments team that we use for the assessments. If we are doing a no-fee assessment when we are installing, we have a team who will do this and help the customer run it for 30 days for a trial run. 

We typically set it up ourselves from an assessment perspective, then when we do services delivery, we typically will do that as part of our service. We will bake that in to whenever we do an NSX engagement, and we will always do at least a vRNI assessment. Then, this helps us be able to sell that product to them as well. When they see the visualization and the ease in which you can monitor the environment, we typically we try to sell vRNI in addition to NSX.

It depends on the technical level of the customers who we are working with. Some customers are very comfortable dropping in OVAs and VMs. It's fairly straightforward for us to do that. We typically include this as part of our vRNI service.

The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries.

We are a managed service provider so we spend a lot of time helping customers transition into the cloud. Application and rationalization are critical, so having this tool allows us to have another tool in our toolkit. This tool is critical because from a VMware perspective, it's really the only tool that does application rationalization. It gives us rich feedback that we need. We help customers move workloads to the right cloud. It's invaluable for us because it gives us that rich data to help us be successful. 

It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly.

It seems like it is fairly competitively priced. We are able to do fairly well with selling it. It seems well-priced, and we're able to do very well with the product.

We use a couple different tools, like RightScale, for application rationalization. Obviously, it's very challenging to get data out of a virtualized environment. vRNI does it better than anything we've used in the past. This is the biggest differentiator over other tools that we have been using. Now, we use vRNI along with other application analysis tools that we use in other practices within our company. We have been able to essentially add a lot of value using this tool with other practices and offerings that we do around application rationalization.

We typically just deploy the latest version that we have, and that's it. We don't go back and do upgrades. Either the customers are doing that themselves or we don't have a specific service that does that. 

This is a must have product if you're a very big gamma customer. You have to have a way to analyze how networking is slowing through your environment.

We used to have the 1000V when we had Cisco for our Cisco customers, and we could use some of that solution, but there is not really any other tool that will provide the type of fidelity and richness of beta that you will need from your VMware environment regardless of whether you're deploying NSX or not, giving you that rich visualization of what's happening in the network layer and what's happening with the application layer within that networking layer in VMware. This is the only tool that you can obtain this level of richness from it.

We use it for network troubleshooting, to provide some capacity reports, and to help generate rules for NSX microsegmentation.

It allows me to really represent network data in a way that management, and non-network engineers, can understand. That makes it easier for me to make my point.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data, whether it originates from the VMware host or from the harbor host.

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. It continues to improve, but I'd like to see better support for hardware stuff.

It's pretty stable. There are some random glitches in the Web UI, but they are usually pretty cosmetic in nature. I don't really seem to be able 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. 

But overall, it's pretty reliable and what I need is in there and its miles ahead of what we had before. So the above are not really complaints, more just observations. It's been getting better since we first deployed it when was on 3.23.4, and we're on 3.8 now.

It's really easy to upgrade. We did have one issue during one upgrade, I believe it was the 3.7, where it was just a bad patch and the upgrade went sideways.

I have it deployed across four vCenters, four proxy VMs. It seems to take up an awful a lot of resources, but it seems to scale pretty well. We added an entire environment to it and it didn't seem to have any problems with that at all. It adjusted the data very quickly, and I can find what I need really fast.

I have used the technical support and technical support was awesome. They got done what I needed done, without any hassle. They called me up, said, "We got it fixed." It was great.

We used a combination of legacy netflow products, some freeware and the like.

My criteria for selecting a vendor include: is it somebody we already have a relationship with? Do I have to go through the vendor selection process on my end? Is it providing a compelling enough use case to warrant the effort we need to be able to go after it? At a high level, does it fit needs that we have today? What's it going to allow us to get done?

The project workload I have is so high that if it doesn't help me with my day-to-day work, or answer questions or solve a problem, I just don't have time for nice-to-have things. Network Insights has been pretty critical, helping me out. I'm working on so many projects running the business that I need all the help I can get with that. It's been great.

It was a super easy setup. I deployed it myself in about an hour, and I have been working with it ever since. We deployed it, initially, for an assessment and then we turned on the demo license and I said, "Okay this is awesome", and we bought it.

It's incredibly powerful for how easy it was to set up.

The value that I have seen is that I spend less time troubleshooting the same problems. It has insight into the virtual environment and the hardware environment, so I'm able to trace problems fairly quickly. I can turn around to a ticket and say, "No it's not the network, here's the graph, this is why". That enables me to get back into project work, which is mostly security, and that benefits the business a lot. It takes a lot off my plate.

We looked at some Netscout stuff but it just wasn't working out. We looked at Cisco Tetration Analytics instead but it wasn't giving us what we wanted.

There is not an easier way to do this. If you have unlimited time, maybe go look at something else. But if you don't, then this is would be the way to do it.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's a fantastic product, it's great. Some of the things I think it should be able to search on, it doesn't. I would also like to see tighter integration with some logging and SNMP-type information. I also use Splunk so I'd like to see something with Splunk. I know it can do vRealize Log Insight but that doesn't seem to do a whole lot for me yet. I only gave it a nine because I know there's so much more potential there. I would tell anybody "Get it". I rated it very highly but there's a lot more potential and room to grow.

We used it for our VDI solution to track down all of the network beginning and endpoints.

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.

It also sped up our time to value. It brought the time it took to implement way down to a number of days, instead of a number of weeks.

The most valuable feature for us is that insight into what our network is really doing - it's a fairly complex network. Not having to go through thousands of lines of network configuration to find firewall ports that were open or closed, for various ports, was very valuable.

It went out and found everything we need very quickly. It did everything we needed it to do.

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.

Once you have learned how to use everything, it becomes easy to use.

It was very stable. In bringing it up we did not have any issues.

I have not been able to get an accurate impression of the scalability. We only use it across one network. It's a large network, so it seems to have scaled for that. I don't know how it would scale for something even larger than what we have currently.

We actually had a technician on site. He was very quickly able to get with the other levels of technical support to get answers for us to any questions he was not able to answer.

We ended up going with VMware and a VDI solution and this product was a recommendation alongside of that. We looked at it and it looked like it would do the job.

The initial setup was very easy to do. But we did have the technician there, walking us through the whole process. He was familiar with it. But it was not that difficult of a setup.

We have not had the opportunity to upgrade to a newer version.

It prevented us from having to spend about $5,000,000 on new desktops and laptops. It cut that down to about a quarter of that price.

Because it looked like it would do the job, we didn't look at anything else.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. I might give it a higher rating if we used it more. We used it for a period of time and then we stopped using it. There was nothing wrong with it, we just didn't use it enough to see it as a 10 out of 10.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is finding one who will actually give what is promised.

We're using it for our microsegmentation project. The performance has been good.

To some degree, it has increased performance, helped to more easily manage networks, and provided visibility. It pulls up more of the physical part of the network.

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.

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.

Also, if it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, which script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls.

And it would be good if it could correlate the server and not just a SQL call, but which database, which server, that would be helpful. I would like to see more things along those lines.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

We don't have any issues with the scalability. The scalability has been fine.

We haven't had to use tech support at all.

We were buying VMware NSX Enterprise as a security solution, to better lock down our environment. vRealize Network Insight was one of the tools they suggested we get, as part of that package, to make the implementation easier.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• ease of use
• integration
• interoperability
• support
• vendor reputation.

I have been using VMware since v1.5. I know the reputation and the support and that helped a lot. Also, their being the leader in the industry, the direction they have been going, and their forward-thinking, were all part of our decision to go with them. A lot of the other vendors are playing catch-up or they're plugging into the VMware infrastructure, so why would I go to somebody else when I can go with somebody who owns the code?

I set it up. It was pretty straightforward to set up. It was pretty easy, especially compared to some other VMware products.

I have also had the opportunity to upgrade it to a newer version. It was easy. It wasn't bad at all.

We bought a package deal so I can't specify the ROI on just this part of it.

Make sure the solution you're looking at is compatible with what you want to do and that it has future growth to it; not just a pinpoint solution but a solution that is part of a bigger vision. You don't want to buy a product that does just this one thing and then you have to buy another product to do something else. Make sure it has interoperability and integration points with some of your bigger infrastructure.

I would rate vRNI at eight out of 10. It would be a 10 if it could bubble up deeper application and user information.