Nutanix Prism Central

Introduction

Prism is a distributed resource management platform which allows you to manage and monitor objects, and services across the Nutanix environment, whether hosted locally or in the cloud.

Prism is broken down into two main components:

• Prism Central (PC)
  • Multiple Nutanix Clusters are managed by Multi-cluster managers and also provide a single, centralized management interface. This is an optional software appliance (VM) which can be deployed in addition to the AOS Cluster (can run on it).
  • 1-to-many cluster manager
• Prism Element (PE)
  • Localized cluster manager responsible for local cluster management and operations. Every Nutanix Cluster has a Prism Element built-in.
  • 1-to-1 cluster manager.

Monitoring Use cases

The device monitoring collects the metric values with respect to time and sends alerts to your team to act up immediately in case of any threshold breach or unexpected metric behavior based on configurations. In a way it helps you with smooth functioning of business with minimal or zero downtime in case of any infrastructure related issues occurring.

The below figure illustrates the conceptual relationship between Prism Central and Prism Element:

Hierarchy of Nutanix Elements

  Cluster
   - Host
    - VM
    - Disks
  - Storage Container

Pre-Requisites

The OpsRamp Gateway must be installed.

Configure and install the integration

1. Go to Setup > Integrations and Apps.
2. Click + ADD on the INSTALLED APP page. The ADD APP page displays all the available applications along with the newly created application with the version.
   Notes:
   • If there are already installed applications, it will redirect to the INSTALLED APPS page, where all the installed applications are displayed.
   • If there are no installed applications, it will navigate to the ADD APP page.
   • You can even search for the application using the search option available. Also you can use the All Categories option to search.

3. Click ADD in the Nutanix Prism Central application.
4. In the Configurations page, click + ADD. The Add Configuration page appears.
5. Enter the below mentioned BASIC INFORMATION:

Notes:

• By default the Is Secure checkbox is selected.
• Select the following:
  • App Failure Notifications: if turned on, you will be notified in case of an application failure.
  • Alert Configuration: map alert configuration for third party alerts into OpsRamp.
• Below are the default values set for:
  • Alert Severity: Possible values of Alert Severity Filter configuration property are kWarning, kCritical, kinfo.
  • Alert Severity Mapping: Possible values of Alert Severity Mapping Filter configuration property are kWarning, kCritical, kInfo.

6. In the RESOURCE TYPE section, select:

   • ALL: All the existing and future resources will be discovered.
   • SELECT: You can select one or multiple resources to be discovered.

7. In the DISCOVERY SCHEDULE section, select Recurrence Pattern to add one of the following patterns:

   • Minutes
   • Hourly
   • Daily
   • Weekly
   • Monthly

8. Click ADD.
   

9. Now the configuration is saved and displayed on the configurations page after you save it.
   
   Note: From the same page, you may Edit and Remove the created configuration.
10. Click NEXT
11. In the Installation page, select an existing registered gateway profile, and click FINISH.

The application is now installed and displayed on the Installed Integration page. Use the search field to find the installed application.

Modify the Configuration

• See Modify an Installed Integration or Application article.

  Note: Select the Nutanix Prism Central application.

View the Nutanix Prism Central details

The Nutanix Prism Central integration is displayed in the Infrastructure > Resources > Cluster. You can navigate to the Attributes tab to view the discovery details, and Metrics tab to view the metric details for Nutanix Prism Central.

Supported Metrics

Risks, Limitations & Assumptions

• Application can handle Critical/Recovery failure notifications for below two cases when user enables App Failure Notifications in configuration
  • Connectivity Exception (ConnectTimeoutException, HttpHostConnectException, UnknownHostException)
  • Authentication Exception (UnauthorizedException)
• Application will not send any duplicate/repeat failure alert notification until the existing critical alert is recovered.
• Application cannot control monitoring pause/resume actions based on above alerts.
• Metrics can be used to monitor Nutanix resources and can generate alerts based on the threshold values.
• Event/Alert polling will be started only if the user enables Event/Alert Polling in configuration.
• Possible values of Event/Alert Severity Filter configuration property are kWarning,kCritical,kInfo.
• OpsRamp has given sample mappings to map Nutanix Severity with OpsRamp Severities as part of the Event/Alert Severity Mapping configuration file. Users can modify them as per their use-case at any point of time from the sdk application configuration page. Possible OpsRamp Severities are Critical, Warning, Ok, Info.
• No support of showing activity log and applied time.
• No support for the option to get Latest snapshot metric.