In VMware Aria Operations for Networks, you can discover applications based on flows.

Flow based application discovery uses machine learning algorithms to auto-discover your applications and application boundaries by analyzing the traffic patterns and network flows in your environment. To learn how to discover applications based on flows, see Discovering Applications Based on Flows.

Procedure

  1. From the left navigation panel, go to Add Applications > Flows.

    You see all the available applications based on flows. You also see application boundaries and tier boundaries between VMs based on the network flow communication between the VMs.

  2. To modify the scope and the naming preference, click Edit Discovery and select the duration and the scope of application discovery.
    To learn more about modifying the scope, see Modify Application Scope.
  3. To upload a CSV file with pre-existing application definitions, click Discovery Options.
    1. Click Browse and upload the CSV file.
      The CSV file must have the VM to application name, and the tier name mapping, as the same file is used for application and tier naming.
      Note: You can also provide regular expressions in the VM Name column of the CSV file. For example, to identify all the VM names starting with MySQL- for an application, you can provide MySQL-.* as the VM name.
    2. Click Next.
      VMware Aria Operations for Networks validates the uploaded CSV file and shows any missing information as an error followed by a table that lists the information that is missing with the respective row numbers. You can also export the missing information table as a CSV file.
  4. Select the naming preference and the order in which you want to name applications and tiers. To learn more, see Set up Application and Tier Naming Preference.
    Note: VMware Aria Operations for Networks recommends the use of naming preferences to create logical and meaningful names for your applications and tiers.
  5. Click Submit.
  6. To pause or stop the auto discovery of flows on the Discover Applications page, click the More Options icon next to Edit Discovery, and select Pause discovery or Stop discovery.
    Note:

    If you click Stop discovery, you loose all the discovered applications.

  7. Click Granularity to group the discovered applications at various levels based on number of tiers and VMs. You can select one of the following Granularity levels:

    • Coarse: The application group includes more tiers and VMs.

    • Medium: The application group includes less tiers and VMs.

    • Fine: The application group includes much fewer tiers and VMs.

    In the tabular view of discovered applications, you can see the Confidence column which describes the accuracy level of the application grouping. High confidence level indicates that the grouping accuracy is high and requires less user intervention.

What to do next

View the applications discovered using flows. To learn more, see Viewing Discovered Applications.