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.
- Tags (vCenter Server or AWS tags)
- VM Names
- ServiceNow
- Flows
An Example of the Application Discovery Construct
- 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
VM Name | Key-value tags |
---|---|
VM1 |
|
VM2 |
|
VM3 |
|
VM4 |
|
To discover applications based on tags
vRealize Network Insight, you can define a grouping criteria for application discovery for these tags.
Application | Tiers and its VMs |
---|---|
MyApplication1 |
|
MyApplication2 |
|
To Create an Application and Tiers Based on VM Names
ApplicationName : Tier : VMName
MyApplication1 : App : VM1 MyApplication1 : Web : VM2 MyApplication2 : App : VM3 MyApplication2 : Web : VM4
- App Regex:
(.*)_(.*)_.*-.*
- Tier Regex:
(.*)_(.*)_(.*)-.*
Application | Tiers and its VMs |
---|---|
MyApplication1 |
|
MyApplication2 |
|
Discover Applications Based on Flows
vRealize Network Insight uses machine learning and statistical analysis to discover applications automatically and groups the VMs into their respective applications and tiers. vRealize Network Insight analyzes the network flow between the VMs and groups the VMs by identifying the application and the tier boundaries between these VMs.
The system analyzes the flows on multiple dimensions such as density of the flows between VMs, common open ports between VMs, number of incoming against outgoing connections, and so on, and groups VMs with high similarity across these dimensions into a unique application. The process repeats again, but only among the VMs that are already grouped into an application, and to group VMs into their respective tiers.
If your configuration does not meet the minimum system requirement, then you can either scale up your platform cluster or reconfigure your brick size. To learn about how to scale up the platform cluster, see Planning to Scale up the Platform Cluster topic, and to learn about reconfiguring the brick size, see KB-83374.