In 2020, VMware introduced an integration between vRealize Operations (vROps) and vRealize Network Insight (vRNI), it was called the vRNI Management Pack and comes with vROps. The latest version is 8.10 and can be found under Data Sources - Integrations - Repository.
We're going to discuss the details of that integration here. As recently announced by VMware, vROps is now known as Aria Operations while vRNI is now Aria Operations for Networks. I use them interchangeably here as applicable.
The vRNI Management Pack includes the following:
Adapter connecting Aria Operations to Aria Operations for Networks
One Dashboard: vRNI Discovered Applications
300+ Alerts and Symptoms
200+ Recommendations
Once enabled, the user can also launch Aria Operations for Networks from Aria Operations itself. Let's first take a look at the high level architecture.
Aria Operations supports dozens of Management Packs, I'm only showing the relevant Adapters in the diagram above.
vCenter Adapter - connects to vCenter/s and pulls data.
NSX Adapter - connects to NSX Manager/s and pulls data.
vRNI Adapter - connects to vRNI and pulls vRNI Discovered Applications and vRNI generated Alerts.
Aria Operations for Networks also has Data Sources, generally vCenter and NSX, which Aria Operations for Networks pulls data from.
I've configured the vRNI Management Pack in my lab, it looks like this.
Point it at your vRNI FQDN/IP, give it credentials, and validate the connection. While not required, it is highly recommended that the vROps Management Pack for NSX be up and running in your environment. This will allow vROps to map Alerts from vRNI to vROps objects discovered by the NSX Adapter. Documentation for the management pack can be found here. Under Advanced Settings you will notice three options:
Import problem events based on common data sources: if Activated this will discard any events from vRNI that have already come in from vCenter and/or NSX Managers directly. It's a way to de-duplicate events.
Import user defined events as notifications: if Activated this will import any user defined vRNI events. In vRNI, they can be found under Alerts - Defined By - User.
Import problem events based on severities: this allows the user to select the severity of problem events they'd like to import. In my lab, I'm importing all of them.
In my lab, the vRNI adapter has imported a vRNI discovered applications and vRNI Alerts. The application is surfaced via the vRNI Applications dashboard.
I've also imported two vRNI generated alerts.
Going into vRNI, you can see one of these is a Critical Problem and the other is an Info Problem, I'm capturing both.
In the end, the vRNI Management Pack is a powerful way to integrate the platforms, similar to what we're doing with the vRLI Management pack, enjoy!