Search results for flow queries by VM tag or VM name become inconsistent after vMotion

Products

• VCF Operations for Networks

Issue/Introduction

• When performing a flow query for a specific virtual machine, inconsistent search results occur.
• When querying a flow by specifying an IP address, the results are a mixture of IP address only and IP address(VM name).
• The problematic virtual machine was recently moved to a different host using vMotion.

Environment

VCF Operations for Networks

Cause

This behaviour can be seen in cases when any networking infrastructure changes causes a vNIC IP change. Due to such updates, the flow information may be temporarily out of sync. 
As a result, flow queries that rely on VM-related entities in these exact time durations may return inconsistent or unexpected results until the backend updates are fully processed.

Resolution

1. The flow information has eventual consistency and automatically gets corrected within a few hours.
2. If flow searches are being done in between these exact timestamps where some IP changes were observed, perform flow searches using source or destination IP addresses instead of VM tags, VM names.