Announcing VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.5 and Cloud

VMware is excited to announce vRealize Network Insight 6.5 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud. vRealize Network Insight increases efficiency and visibility with this release, whether it is to help detect network flows containing the latest attack Apache Log4j or troubleshooting an application optimization issue over a multi-cloud network for a quick resolution.

The rich new feature set continues to add to the extremely capable network visibility and analytics capabilities in vRealize Network Insight Cloud. For IT staff, having full information of the network helps build validated network designs as well as helps maintain the networks that keep applications running smoothly and securely. Customers are provided a single screen with an analytical view of health, performance, capacity, and intents across virtual, physical and cloud networks.

In today’s environment, integrations are key to expanding the infrastructure knowledge customers (read a case study) find when using the vRealize Network Insight Cloud service for VMware SD-WAN or NSX-T 3.2. The new vRealize Network Insight 6.5 release introduces integrations with the latest NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously known as AVI) integration. This release also supports vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification visibility for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) as well as Check Point Firewalls in network map, paths, and intents capabilities.

**Figure 1.** Highlights of the new vRealize Network Insight 6.5 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud release.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI) integration

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides native integration into NSX-T which has an advantage over other appliance-based load balancers. vRealize Network Insight’s new visibility into the NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides a more complete and better NSX-T monitoring and troubleshooting viewpoint for end-to-end issues between applications and infrastructure. This release supports NSX Advanced Load Balancer for VMs in on-premises deployments as well as a VMware Cloud deployment like VMware Cloud on AWS. vRealize Network Insight’s integration with NSX Advanced Load Balancer will provide users with faster insights and deeper troubleshooting with correlation on how network traffic traversing load balancing connects with the rest of the infrastructure. vRealize Network Insight provides a correlated end-to-end view which helps root cause why issues are happening that can’t be determined by just looking at issues from a single point in the network infrastructure.

**Figure 2.** The NSX Advanced Load Balancer integration provides richer application layer information into vRealize Network Insight.

**Figure 3.** Having an end-to-end view across the infrastructure can help correlate an issue which first looks like an application problem (Layer 4 to Layer 7) down to the actual root cause which can occur at a lower layer (Layer 1 or Layer 2) that vRealize Network Insight also has visibility into.

**Figure 4.** The new integration with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer integration provides visibility into the various inventory components plus config, paths, metrics, and events.

**Figure 5.** vRealize Network Insight always provides an end-to-end topology view of how the various components including the NSX Advanced Load Balancer visually connects the network with other VMware and 3rd party infrastructure.

Guided Network Troubleshooting

A new troubleshooting capability added into vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification is Guided Network Troubleshooting. Guided Network Troubleshooting is an application aware root cause analysis capability that introduces various troubleshooting incidents/anomalies into a visual dependency tree or relationship graph for Applications, VMs, alerts, and potential issues. It allows someone who is troubleshooting the ability to visually navigate, correlate metrics, view anomalies, and alerts without using search queries that an entry-level operator may not know about. Using many real-life customers input to our product teams on how customers troubleshoot various network issues, this new capability was built into vRealize Network Insight. The challenges customers have in manually troubleshooting is today’s high level of network complexity, siloed knowledge across groups, as well as time to insight. Now we a large leap in reducing the complexity of those troubleshooting issues by helping automate the visual graph of how infrastructure is related on the network for a quicker time to resolution and network innocence. For this release, this capability is first available for vRealize Network Insight Cloud. In summary, we are getting closer to that “easy” button.

FIPS 140-2, Streaming Databus, and more

In terms of security, encryption over internal and external connections as well as US Federal requirements, vRealize Network Insight now supports FIPS 140-2 compliance with VMware’s validated cryptographic modules. Other key features also in this release include Streaming Databus support for vRealize Network Insight Cloud. This is a very useful capability which allows the rich data within the vRealize Network Insight platform to also be sent to other 3^rd party destinations or tools a customer may want. This previously was available for the on-premises deployments of vRealize Network Insight, but now is also available for vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS). For both SaaS and on-premises, there is additional Databus support for flows, metrics, as well as configs for VMs, hosts, NICs, and switch ports.

All of these new vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Network Insight Cloud capabilities are also available with vRealize Cloud Universal which will result in higher productivity and agility for network and cloud admins as they manage their unique networks and their company’s infrastructure.

Start a Trial

There are many useful integrations and network visibility capabilities available in vRealize Network Insight 6.5 and Cloud so start the 30-Day Free Trial of vRealize Network Insight Cloud. If you need more reasons, check out the blog 5 Reasons to try vRealize Network Insight Cloud