vRealize Network Insight provides a robust search for all the entities in your environment.

Here are some of the terms that can help you with the search feature in vRealize Network Insight:
  • Entities: A data center consists of physical and logical building blocks such as host, virtual machine, switch, router, NSX Manager and so on. The instances of these blocks are entities.
  • Property: An entity consists of multiple properties. A property can be either a configuration property or a metric property.
    1. Configuration Property: An entity can be described by its configuration properties. A configuration property can be either integer or real value or a string or a boolean value.
      • Name, CPU cores, and operating system for virtual machines
      • Name, and number of virtual machines for hosts
    2. Metric Property: Any property which measures a particular characteristic of an entity is a metric property. The values of metric properties are captured at regular intervals of time. CPU usage, memory usage, and network usage for virtual machines are some examples of metric properties.
  • Aggregate Functions: They can be used in the search queries to compute the total number of instances of a particular entity type or maximum property of an entity. vRealize Network Insight supports following aggregation functions.
    1. sum
    2. max
    3. min
    4. avg

When you search for entities, the software displays the entities that match your search query on the Results page.

For each search query, the search bar suggests you the next term that you can use to narrow down your search results. For example, when you enter the term vm, the search bar displays a possible list of terms that you can add to your existing term to narrow down your search results. The search bar also validates each search query. A check mark denotes a valid search query and a cross mark denotes an invalid search query. The Help page provides examples of currently supported queries.