Insight Point

Secure datasource discovery using an Insight Point running in your own environment.

What is a Veza Insight Point?

An Insight Point is a lightweight connector running in your environment to enable the secure gathering of authorization metadata for resources that Veza cannot access directly. An Insight Point is typically deployed as a Docker container or VM OVA.

Insight Point Deployment Diagram.

Typically, you will want an Insight Point to enable secure discovery of services (such as Active Directory, Oracle Database, or SQL Server) that require connectivity from within your corporate network. The Insight Point will run within your network to query the internal-only data sources for authorization metadata and push that information to Veza securely.

When do I need an Insight Point?

Deploying an Insight Point for Veza is usually not required, but might be necessary:

  • When the resources to discover are not exposed publicly.

  • To discover databases and other services that do not have cloud-native APIs.

  • If your organization prohibits 3rd-party programmatic access to cloud service providers.

  • To discover on-premise Active Directory and SQL Server.

Installation Options

  • Veza provides an installation script to install an Insight Point for common Linux distributions.

  • The Insight Point is also available as an OVA image suitable for Oracle Virtualbox or VMWare VSphere. This option can be preferable to Docker for Windows-based environments.

  • For AWS environments, see Deploy with AWS EC2 for instructions to start an Insight Point on AWS EC2.

After deploying the Insight Point, you can specify it when configuring an integration. Veza will use the Insight Point for secure collection and transmission of entity metadata.

System Requirements

Before deploying an Insight Point, ensure your environment meets the following minimum requirements:

Resource
Minimum Requirement

CPU

2 cores

Memory

4 GB RAM

Storage

20 GB available disk space

Network

Outbound HTTPS (port 443) access to Veza tenant and ECR

Note: These are minimum requirements for typical deployments. If you experience performance issues or timeouts during data collection, consider increasing CPU and memory allocation. Contact Veza support for guidance on resource scaling for your specific environment.

Generating an Insight Point key

Log in to Veza with an administrator account, and create a registration key by browsing to Integrations > Insight Points:

  1. Click Create

  2. Enter a Name

  3. Click Generate Key

  4. Copy the key for use when running the docker image

Save the Insight Point key in a secure location. If lost, there is no way to recover it.

Troubleshooting

  • Insufficient Resources: Ensure the Insight Point meets the system requirements. The instance must have at least 2 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM allocated.

Refer to specific deployment guides for troubleshooting steps.

Checking connectivity

The Insight Point automatically checks for connectivity on container start. This includes steps to resolve the DNS and verify TCP and HTTP communication. If there are connection problems, the container logs will indicate if a connection was refused, a host could not be found, or there is another issue.

Monitoring Insight Point availability

The Veza platform emits an Insight Point Unavailable event after the Insight Point is unavailable for several minutes. To reduce the number of times this event triggers, the task manager will not re-emit the event for 24h hours. An administrator can configure event subscriptions to get email notifications when connectivity issues impact Veza data collection.

Note: If the Insight Point task manager service is restarted, the event can be emitted sooner than the 24-hour window.

To enable email alerts when an Insight Point is unavailable:

  1. Use the Veza navigation menu to open Administration > Event Subscriptions

  2. Click Create Subscription

  3. On the Details tab, enter a descriptive name to communicate the alert purpose.

  4. On the Conditions tab:

    • Set Event Type to "Insight Point Unavailable"

    • Set Severity to "Error"

    • Set Category to "Integrations"

  5. On the Action → Send Alert tab, select or create an email Veza Action

  6. Click Create to save the subscription

Example of Insight Point monitoring subscription

Changing an Insight Point

When modifying the Insight Point associated with an integration — for example, if the registration key is lost — you will need to re-enter the credentials and secrets for that integration configuration.

  • Follow the instructions to start another Insight Point with a new deployment key

  • On the Integrations page, edit the integration configuration to re-enter the credentials for each affected integration.

Ports and connectivity

The Insight Point will communicate out from the container VM to the Veza Tenant and targeted systems. Your implementation must enable traffic to and from the host on the required ports.

Also, the host must be able to communicate out to the ECR repository hosting the insight point image.

Required
Destination
Protocol
Port

yes

Veza Tenant

TCP

443

yes

public.ecr.aws

TCP

443

for AD

AD Domain Controller

TCP/UDP

636

for SQL

SQL Server

TCP

1433

  • The Insight Point must be able to communicate with https://<your-org>.vezacloud.com on outbound port 443. Ensure that firewalls allow outbound traffic to the Veza tenant domain.

  • For Active Directory and SQL Server: The Insight Point must be allowed to communicate with Active Directory Domain Controllers on port 636, and SQL Servers on port 1433.

  • For AWS RDS and Trino: To discover AWS RDS or Trino instances, you will need to add the Insight Point egress IP to the Security Groups Inbound rules. Do this for each of the instances to discover.

To add an entry for AWS RDS:

  1. Log in to the AWS account containing the resources to discover, and go to RDS > Databases

  2. Click the DB identifier and go to Connectivity & security > Security > VPC security groups

  3. Click Inbound rules > Edit inbound rules to set the IP address entry

  4. Click Add rule > Type (MySQL, Aurora or PostgreSQL) > Source (Custom)

  5. Enter the Insight Point egress IP

  6. Optionally enter a description and click Save rules

To add an entry for Trino:

  1. Log in to the AWS account containing the resources to discover, and go to EC2 > Security Groups

  2. Click the Security Group associated with your Trino instances and go to 'Inbound rules' > 'Edit inbound rules' to set the IP address entry

  3. Click 'Add rule' > Type (Custom TCP) > Port Range (8080 or your custom port) > Source (Custom) > enter the Insight Point egress IP

  4. Optionally enter a description, and save the rules

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