This section provides an overview of the architecture of VMware Edge Network Intelligence.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence uses an on-premises device to collect data from many data sources and then sends that data to the VMware Edge Network Intelligence back-end system (either in the cloud or on-prem). The device is called a crawler and may be a standalone device, a virtual machine, or built into a VMware SD-WAN Edge device. The crawler can be located in a central data center or in branch locations. Multiple crawlers work together to collect data and de-duplicate any overlapping data. The crawlers collect data from switches, routers, WLAN controllers, UC systems, RADIUS servers, SPAN sessions, inline data from SDWAN sessions, and other applications. This data is combined to identify edge devices and their application and network statistics. Using that data, the VMware Edge Network Intelligence backend creates baselines for performance and identifies the root cause of any performance or connectivity issue.
Typically, crawlers are placed in the network near to a point where user traffic can be captured via a SPAN or TAP (this is often near the WLAN controllers). Alternatively, when the crawler is the same device as the SD-WAN Edge, user data is collected from the pass through traffic. The crawler management interface is used to collect data from the other components of the system as well as to send the collected data to the VMware Edge Network Intelligence back-end system.
