vRealize Network Insight Archives

Transferring Applications between vRealize Network Insight instances

March 18, 2022 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Let’s say you have multiple vRealize Network Insight instances. Maybe a staging instance for trying new searches, alerts, or other configuration – and a production instance. Or you’re migrating from an on-premises instance to a vRealize Network Insight Cloud instance. Or you just want a backup of the hard work you put into curating the applications. As with many things; there’s an API and script for that!

Python SDK & Examples

The Python SDK is a library generated automatically by the OpenAPI specification that vRealize Network Insight has baked in. In addition, it has a ton of example scripts that … Read more

Integrating vRealize Automation Cloud & vRealize Network Insight Cloud

February 9, 2022 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When you have vRealize Automation in place to deploy applications, vRA is the source of truth when it comes to the application landscape. It makes sense to treat it that way, and not have other products (like vRealize Operations or vRealize Network Insight) have to discover those newly deployed applications on their own. Which is what this post is about!

Before you continue, I’ll not be going too deep into vRA, vRNI, or the Extensibility in vRA that makes this happen and assume you know the basic of those products and features. This post explain how to get your vRA … Read more

vRealize Network Insight Cookbook Update

December 14, 2021 / Martijn / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I posted about the vRealize Network Insight Cookbook. Honestly, the pandemic and other events over the last two years drained my creativity, especially in writing. The goal was to update it with new features every six months, and add more of the big ticket items (like SD-WAN, Network Assurance and Verification) continously. More than a year and a half later, I can say that that plan failed. 🙁

However! My writing creativity seems to be getting back to some resemblance of what it was and I’ve started updating the digital cookbook. 🙂

Cookbook Updates

Event-Based Automation with vRealize Network Insight & VEBA

November 29, 2021 / Martijn / 0 Comments

With the release of vRealize Network Insight 6.4 – something awesome was added: the databus. In its essence, the databus is a feature that exports data out of vRNI using REST API webhooks. These webhooks deliver the data over HTTP[S] to an endpoint that can then parse and process the data. There are several message groups, which you can subscribe an endpoint to. The message group decides what type of data is exported and with the initial databus feature, you can subscribe to: Application updates (newly discovered, updated, or deleted apps), and Problems (alerts). The latter open up event-based … Read more

Natural Language Searches with PowervRNI

November 1, 2021 / Martijn / 0 Comments

vRealize Network Insight 6.3 brought a new API endpoint: /search/ql. The QL stands for Query Language, which is the same language that’s used in the search bar. I added support for that endpoint in PowervRNI 2.0 with the cmdlet Invoke-vRNISearch. With this post, I’d like to explain why that’s the best since sliced bread. 😉

Previously, there was the /search API endpoint, but that used an internal query language. You would run a search in the vRNI interface, open up the browser Developer Tools and look for the internal query that went against the vRNI backend. You could … Read more

Using Terraform to deploy vRealize Network Insight Cloud Collector to VMware Cloud on AWS

March 22, 2021 / Martijn / 2 Comments

That’s a long post title, right?! Well, a lot of moving parts for this one. 😉

Terraform is a powerful tool to achieve infrastructure-as-code. You can do many things, from configuring Cisco ACI to creating and maintaining a VMware Cloud on AWS and everything in between. There’s also a vSphere provider that allows you to deploy VMs from OVA templates. That’s where this story begins.

vRealize Network Insight Cloud has a platform where the data is stored and a collector, which does the collecting. This collector needs to be placed as close to the data source as possible. For VMware … Read more

Configuration Backups of vRealize Network Insight

July 22, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Similar to my last post, I found another small gem in the vRealize Network Insight 5.3 release: the ability to backup all configuration within the Platform.

Unsupported

Before you continue reading, please note that this is an unsupported feature right in 5.3. It’ll be officially supported later this year. Having said that…These new API endpoints in the API Explorer caught my eye:

Snapshots

Currently, the supported method of creating backups of Network Insight is to power down the VM, take a snapshot, backup that snapshot, and power the VM back up. Needless to say, that needs some work. I … Read more

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