vRealize Network Insight Archives - Page 3 of 4

vRealize Network Insight 4.0 – Smaller Gems

December 23, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Network Insight 4.0 was released today and it undeniably the biggest release they’re ever done. It’s packed with some huge features and a lot of small goodness.

While Karl has done an excellent job of describing the top features in this blog post, I’ll go through the somewhat smaller features which will make your life better. But first, here’s a quick recap of the major features:

Cisco ACI support to gain insight into the underlying topology
Standardized BGP-EVPN support as an underlay
F5 BIG-IP router support
Cisco ASA support
sFlow support for incoming network flows

Walkthroughs or “Self Service”

Integrating ServiceNow with Network Insight

November 19, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

In a previous post, Integrating vRealize Automation with Network Insight, I covered how greenfield applications can be automatically pushed into vRealize Network Insight to provide application context with the analytics of Network Insight. This post is about importing brownfield into Network Insight to get insights into the behavior of your existing applications. Specifically, importing CMDB information from ServiceNow.

Disclaimer: This is something I built, it is not officially supported by VMware.

CMDB

In the case of existing applications, your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) should be your source of truth. There are a lot of CMDB products out there, … Read more

Integrating vRealize Automation with Network Insight

November 8, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

In order to get a complete view of your network traffic flows between applications inside Network Insight, it should know things about your application stacks. This post will go into how to create an integration with vRealize Automation in order to get all new application stacks into Network Insight. This will happen on the moment that an application is deployed from a blueprint, instantly transferring info so every greenfield application will give context in Network Insight.

Disclaimer: This is something I built, it is not officially supported by VMware.

As you may know by now, Network Insight listens … Read more

Integrating vRealize Network Insight and Log Insight

September 26, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Starting in version 3.8 of Network Insight, you can integrate vRealize Log Insight with Network Insight in order to get faster changes in the NSX environment.

Polling vs real-time data

Currently, the collector of Network Insight polls NSX every 10 minutes for changes in the entities (security groups, tags, firewall rules, etc). It will also back off when the NSX Manager has too much load, extending the polling period and give the NSX Manager some breathing room. While this is generally okay for troubleshooting scenarios, it should be improved significantly for monitoring purposes where you need real-time data.

Syslog

This … Read more

Using PowervRNI to configure SNMP settings on data sources

September 3, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Version 1.2 of PowervRNI was just released and it contains 2 new cmdlets:

Get-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig
Set-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig

You can use these cmdlets to see and update SNMP configuration on specific data sources. All Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, and Juniper devices are data sources where SNMP can be enabled for richer data collection. This basically turns on interface counter collections, so you can have pretty graphs like this:

Examples

To give you an idea of how to use these new cmdlets, check out the examples below. Of course, there is also documentation available in the module itself, viewable via the Get-Help cmdlet.

Get-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig

vRealize Network Insight 3.8 – What’s new in the API?

June 19, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

One of my favorite products has just dropped a new version. vRealize Network Insight 3.8 (vRNI) has just hit the downloads and has a bunch of cool new stuff.

vRNI 3.6 introduced a public API with which you can do most of the day-2 operations. vRNI 3.7 didn’t bring any changes to the API, but 3.8 does. Below are the changes in the API version 1.1.0.

Fetching info in bulk

Version 1.0.0 had endpoints to grab information from entities (VMs, hosts, firewall rules, etc), but it was a bit tedious. You had to request a paged list of entities … Read more

PowervRNI is now on PowerShell Gallery

March 5, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

PowerShell is about making things easy and consumable. Same goes for PowervRNI, making repetitive tasks in vRealize Network Insight easier and make it possible to extract information from vRNI.

It’s not that easy to load a custom module into PowerShell though, you have to download 1 or 2 files, then load it into your PowerShell session by referencing those local files. The PowerShell Gallery is a pretty awesome way to also make module management very easy. All you have to do is use the Install-Module command and it downloads and installs the module for you.

For the module authors, … Read more

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