When you are performing flow-based application discovery, vRealize Network Insight provides options to set up the naming preference and allows you to choose the order of naming your applications and tiers. Setting up naming preferences helps you create logical and meaningful names for your applications and tiers.

By default, vRealize Network Insight names applications and tiers based on the names of the VMs that are part of applications and tiers. If the VM names are not logical or meaningful, then applications and tier names do not help you to find the actual applications or tiers.

Therefore, when you perform flow-based application discovery, you can set the naming preference for your applications and tiers. You can also activate or deactive naming preferences, and choose the order of naming the applications and tiers. vRealize Network Insight automatically renames the existing applications and tiers, and names the newly discovered applications and tiers, as per your set naming preference and order.

Procedure

  1. On the Discover Applications page, in the Scope bar of the Flows tab, click Edit Discovery.
  2. In the Edit Discovery window, click Application and Tier Naming.
  3. From the Applications drop-down menu, select the naming preference you want to add.
    You can select one or more of the following naming preferences and arrange them in the order they must be considered:
    • Load balancer
    • Security groups
    • Security tags
    • VM names
    • Upload CSV
    • VM tags

    To arrange the order of the naming preferences, you must use the drag icon.

    vRealize Network Insight renames your applications based on the preferences and the order you select. You can see how your selection changes the application names in the Tip section.

  4. If you are naming your applications and tiers based on VM names, you can also use regular expressions. You can select the Regex option in the Status column of VM Names, and in the Application Naming and Tier Naming sections, do one of the following:

    • Select Regex and provide a regular expression using which you want to name your applications and tiers.
    • Click Pattern Builder, select a sample VM to identify the pattern, choose the position of characters or groups to create the pattern, and click Submit.
  5. If you want to upload the names of VMs, applications, and tiers manually, you can activate the Upload CSV option and select the CSV file containing the list of names.
    Note: You can also provide regular expressions in the VM Name column of the CSV file. For example, to identify all the VM names starting with MySQL- for an application, you can provide MySQL-.* as the VM name.
  6. Click SUBMIT.

If applications or tiers do not match your selected naming preference, then the system renames applications or tiers based on the VM names.