When you have several applications or when you have multiple tiers in an application, creating applications using the public APIs or the user interface becomes a long process. vRealize Network Insight auto-discovers the applications and enables you to add the applications and their tiers automatically, which reduces a lot of manual efforts.

vRealize Network Insight can perform Application Discovery based on:
  • Tags (vCenter Server or AWS tags)
  • VM Names
  • ServiceNow
  • Flows

An Example of the Application Discovery Construct

Let's assume,
  • you have added vCenter Server as a data source
  • you have four VMs in your datacenter - VM1, VM2, VM3, and VM4.
  • you have defined tags (key-value) that defines the application names to which each VMs belongs
  • you have defined tags (key-value) that defines the tier to which each VMs belongs
For example, see the table:
VM Name Key-value tags
VM1
  • Application Name: MyApplication1
  • Application Tier: App
VM2
  • Application Name: MyApplication1
  • Application Tier: Web
VM3
  • Application Name: MyApplication2
  • Application Tier: App
VM4
  • Application Name: MyApplication2
  • Application Tier: Web

To discover applications based on tags

vRealize Network Insight, you can define a grouping criteria for application discovery for these tags.

In this example, based on the defined tags and grouping criteria, vRealize Network Insight discovers two applications (MyApplication1 and MyApplication2) with two tiers (App and Web) and its related VMs.
Application Tiers and its VMs
MyApplication1
  • App and VM1
  • Web and VM2
MyApplication2
  • App and VM3
  • Web and VM4

To create an application and tiers based on VM Names

Let's assume, the VM names are defined in a particular format. ApplicationName : Tier : VMName
MyApplication1 : App : VM1
MyApplication1 : Web : VM2
MyApplication2 : App : VM3
MyApplication2 : Web : VM4
Note: Randomly defined VM names cannot be grouped for application discovery.
When you use the following regex, vRealize Network Insight discovers two applications.
  • App Regex: (.*)_(.*)_.*-.*
  • Tier Regex: (.*)_(.*)_(.*)-.*
Application Tiers and its VMs
MyApplication1
  • App and MyApplication1 : App : VM1
  • Web and MyApplication1 : Web : VM2
MyApplication2
  • App and MyApplication2 : App : VM3
  • Web and MyApplication2 : Web : VM4