Insight Point

Secure datasource discovery using an Insight Point running in your 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.

Time Synchronization Requirements

Insight Points require accurate time synchronization to communicate properly with the Veza platform. Time drift can cause workflow timeouts and authentication failures. We recommend:

• Synchronizing the Insight Point host system clock to actual time

• A configured and running NTP service on the Insight Point Host

• Reliable NTP servers configured, for example using pool.ntp.org or your organization's NTP servers for redundancy

Verification:

# Check current time and NTP status
timedatectl status

# Verify NTP synchronization
timedatectl show-timesync --all

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
Architecture	linux/amd64 or linux/arm64

Note: These are minimum requirements for typical deployments. For large data sources, see Known Issues for additional resource recommendations. 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.

Known Issues

Large Data Source Extractions

When connecting to very large data sources—such as Active Directory domains with 100,000+ users or databases with extensive metadata—Insight Points may experience instability during data extraction. In this case, standard minimum resources may be insufficient, leading to performance issues or service interruptions.

If the Insight Point becomes unresponsive during extraction jobs, requires manual restart to resume operation, or extraction jobs timeout before completing, these symptoms typically indicate that the Insight Point is struggling with resource constraints when processing data.

To address these issues, consider increasing resource allocation significantly beyond the minimum requirements. For Active Directory environments with 300,000+ entities, use a minimum of 8 GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, and 40 GB storage. Monitor the Insight Point container logs for memory exhaustion or resource-related errors that can help identify the root cause of stability issues.

• Ensure the network connection between the Insight Point and target systems is stable throughout long-running extraction processes. Network interruptions can cause extraction failures that require restarting the entire process.

• For organizations with 9 or more Active Directory domains, consider deploying multiple Insight Points to distribute processing load across instances.

• For particularly large environments, contact Veza support for specific resource sizing recommendations and potential optimizations tailored to your deployment.

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.

• Install Script

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.

Insight Point status

The Veza platform tracks the health of each Insight Point and its instances. An Insight Point can run multiple instances for high availability, and the overall Insight Point status is determined by the health of all its instances.

Insight Point statuses:

Status	Description
OK	All Insight Point instances are online and functioning normally
Degraded	Some instances are online while others are unavailable or out of sync. The Insight Point has partial availability
Unavailable	All Insight Point instances are offline or unreachable
Unknown	Status cannot be determined (typically only seen during initial setup)

Individual instance statuses:

Status	Description
OK	Instance is online and responding to health checks
Unavailable	Instance is offline or not responding to health checks
Out of Sync	Instance is responding but has time drift issues. The system clock is not properly synchronized with the control plane
Unknown	Status cannot be determined

An Insight Point instance is considered unavailable if it fails to respond to health checks for several minutes (determined by the heartbeat interval and offline strike threshold). Time drift is detected when an instance's system clock differs significantly from the control plane time, which can cause authentication failures and workflow issues.

You can view the status of your Insight Points in the Veza UI under Integrations > Insight Points.

Monitoring Insight Point availability

The Veza platform monitors Insight Point status and emits events when connectivity or synchronization issues are detected. To reduce the number of times events trigger, the task manager will not re-emit the same event type for 24 hours. An administrator can configure event subscriptions to get email notifications when issues impact Veza data collection.

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

The platform emits three types of Insight Point monitoring events:

Insight Point Unavailable (Error)

• Triggered when the entire Insight Point is completely unavailable

• All instances are offline or unreachable

• Severity: Error

Insight Point Degraded (Warning)

• Triggered when some instances are online but others are unavailable or out of sync

• The Insight Point has partial availability

• Severity: Warning

Insight Point Instance Out of Sync (Warning)

• Triggered when an instance has time drift issues

• The instance is responding but its system time is not synchronized with the control plane

• Resolution: Ensure NTP is properly configured on the Insight Point host and restart the instance

• Severity: Warning

To enable email alerts for Insight Point issues:

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", "Insight Point Degraded", or "Insight Point Instance Out of Sync" depending on which issues you want to monitor

   • Set Severity to "Error" (for Unavailable) or "Warning" (for Degraded/Out of Sync)

   • 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

You can create multiple subscriptions to monitor different severity levels or event types.

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