Posts - Page 7 of 31

Secure Logging from vRealize Network Insight

February 11, 2020 / Martijn / 6 Comments

By default, the syslog capability in vRealize Network Insight only supports UDP on port 514, sending the messages in cleartext. It’s important to have Network Insight send its logs somewhere, though, as they can be useful when troubleshooting Network Insight itself.

To be clear, these logs contain information about the Network Insight platform and collector appliances. Logs on processing incoming data, errors when the collector is unable to connect to a data source (vCenter, switch, NSX, router, etc.). If you’re looking for logs on network changes (the network that Network Insight monitors), look at the System and User-Defined Events… Read more

Adding 100 Switches to vRealize Network Insight in 20 minutes

January 9, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Adding a bunch of data sources to vRealize Network Insight can be tedious, especially when the number of data sources goes into the 100s. This is one of the reasons why PowervRNI exists, and it’s been helping organizations to add their entire network infrastructure to Network Insight in 1 go.

There’s an example script in the PowervRNI GitHub repository called datasource-bulk-import.ps1, that allows you to add data sources of all types in bulk. To make getting started a little easier, I’ve recorded a video that focuses on adding 100 Cisco Nexus 5K switches to Network Insight in roughly 20 … Read more

My 2019 in books

December 30, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

I like to read, and I learn better using books. This is why I always go through as many books as I can in a year. Goodreads keeps track for me, and in 2019, the tally was 43. Every year, I do an internal review of these books, but certain people convinced me just to post this. Here are my top picks!

Growth

I know, such a generic title. Basically, these are non-fiction books that I’ve used to extract learnings from and use in daily work or personal life.

People Powered by Jono Bacon. I haven’t finished this

Using Azure DevOps Pipelines with Qt

December 27, 2019 / Martijn / 4 Comments

This post goes into building an Azure DevOps Pipeline, which builds an Qt application. I recently moved to Azure, and found this combination not documented very well. I stepped in a lot of pitfalls and want to spare you the same.

First, some backstory; I’ve created this application, called WhatPulse (personal computer & productivity stats), which is built in C++ and the Qt framework. I’ve been using GitLab to host the code, and have been using their CI/CD pipelines to do automated compiling and testing of WhatPulse. The workers (the machines that execute the pipeline) were VMs, running locally … Read more

PowervRNI 1.7: What’s New?

November 19, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Version 1.7 of PowervRNI was released yesterday, and this post covers what’s new in this version. If you’re not familiar with PowervRNI, it is a PowerShell module that you can use to manage vRealize Network Insight. From adding data sources & applications, to retrieve data from it, such a network flows, PowervRNI covers most of the public API endpoints of Network Insight.

What’s New?

A bunch! First off, it has been updated to support the new data sources and API calls that have been added in Network Insight 5.0. Second, I’ve added a few backlog items. I’ll … Read more

Roneo: A NetFlow Duplicator

October 16, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Introducing a new project that I’ve been working on: Roneo the NetFlow Duplicator.

It is essentially a very simplistic and fast UDP traffic forwarder written in Python, that’s designed to forward NetFlow/sFlow traffic. You might know that I work with vRealize Network Insight a lot, which ingests NetFlow data. There are some limitations with NetFlow devices (vSphere Distributed Switch can only send to 1 collector, and there are some other devices that have the same limitation), making a duplicator necessary when the flows need to go to multiple systems.

Why something new?

I’ve written about sending NetFlow to multiple collectors … Read more

Developing PowerShell with Visual Studio Code in Containers

September 6, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Visual Studio Code is one of the best things to come out of Microsoft. No kidding. I’ve been using it for development since early 2018 and it keeps on getting better. The customization possibilities are endless and the number of extensions is impressive. You can find everything, from themes to lint parsers, to code beautifiers. There’s also an extension for Remote Development, which is the focus for this post.

Remote Development

I’ve been coding for a while, and I typically do this on a remote server for a couple of reasons:

You don’t need the dependencies installed locally or mess