Chapter 15 Infoblox Network Insight

This chapter provides information about Infoblox Network Insight, which unites network discovery for geographically dispersed networks, infrastructure devices and network assets with the Infoblox IPAM (IP Address Management) solution. Through discovery, Network Insight provides automated, comprehensive, and accurate data about your network devices and their attributes so you can have better visibility in your network infrastructure, including the virtual network infrastructure, and manage it more efficiently.
This chapter describes how you use Network Insight to detect and manage information about network infrastructure devices, how to provision and de-provision networks, and how to manage and provision device ports, including switched Ethernet.
It includes the following sections:

About Network Insight
Infoblox Network Insight provides discovery features for detecting and managing devices in your network infrastructure. You can use discovery to collect device data and manage it through Grid Manager. For more information about device management, see Managing Discovered Data.
You can view the operating state of all discovered network infrastructure devices and newly discovered IP networks, including but not limited to routers, firewalls, load balancers, Ethernet L2/L3 switches, end hosts, end host networks, VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) virtual networks, and single and multipoint VPNs. Network Insight makes it easy to manage and secure your enterprise network by detecting all interfaces for every discovered device and providing specific information about them. For information about discovering VRF virtual networks, see Discovering VRF Virtual Networks.
The Infoblox IPAM feature set also provides control mechanisms by including and excluding networks and IP addresses for discovery. You can schedule and define when discovery takes place on any network, and define blackout periods during which no discovery tasks occur. Infoblox IPAM and DHCP functions also extend network control to assigning of discovered switch and router interfaces to IPAM objects such as IP networks, IP reservations, and host records. The assignments are called port reservations and are part of a feature set called port control, managed through Grid Manager. For more information, see Port Control Features in Network Insight.
Infoblox provides a few reports in which you can view trending information about the device groups, types of devices, and device IP addresses for the devices that are discovered by Network Insight. For information about these reports, see Network Insight Dashboards.