You can perform an advanced application discovery to discover applications using a combination of VM names, NSX-V security tags, and security group tags from your VMware vCenter, Azure, AWS, and VMware NSX-T environments.

Procedure

  1. From the left navigation panel, go to Applications > Discover.
  2. Select the Advanced tab.
  3. (Optional) If you have already defined a template using which you want to perform application discovery, select the template from the App discovery templates drop-down menu. The application discovery starts automatically.
  4. Define the scope based on which you want to discover applications and tiers.
    • Select All VMs to see a list of all VMs from all the data sources that are added in VMware Aria Operations for Networks.
    • Select Manual Selection and filter the VMs based on your requirement like account, data center, manager, and so on.
      For example, this query limits the discovery of applications to specific regions: 
      VMs where Region in ( 'Central US' , 'East US' )
  5. Group applications by different VM properties using regular expressions based pattern matching.
    • Enter a regular expression of your choice.

    • Click Pattern Builder to define patterns using groups or position of characters in strings.

      1. To build a pattern or the regular expression based on the VM name, select the default VM name or select a VM from the list.

      2. Click on a position or a group to construct a pattern.

        Note:

        After selecting a group, if you select a character or position, VMware Aria Operations for Networks ignores your group selection for building the pattern and vice versa.

        Based on your selections, you see the pattern appearing on the screen. You also see the list of applications that match the pattern, the count of VMs in the respective applications, and the VM names in the respective applications.

      3. Click Submit.

  6. (Optional) Click Found count Applications to see the list of application names, VM names, and the number of VMs that matches the regular expression.
  7. (Optional) Click Unclassified VMs to see a list of VMs that are not following the specified name pattern.
  8. (Optional) Select Save changes to to create a template or update an existing template.
    Note: If you are an admin user, you can update all templates. If you are a member user, you can only edit the templates that you had created.
  9. Click Discover.

What to do next

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