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Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations provides monitoring, analytics, capacity planning, reporting, and automation capabilities for Nutanix infrastructure.
With NCM 2.0, Intelligent Operations is integrated into the Nutanix Central experience and is designed to provide operational visibility across one or more Prism Central domains. This allows teams to view infrastructure inventory, monitor operational signals, analyze capacity trends, generate reports, and automate common operational workflows from a centralized cloud management interface.
Intelligent Operations helps infrastructure and operations teams answer questions such as:
The following sections cover key Intelligent Operations capabilities in NCM 2.0:
NCM 2.0 introduces a more unified operating model for Intelligent Operations. Instead of viewing each Prism Central environment in isolation, teams can onboard multiple Prism Central domains into Nutanix Central and use Intelligent Operations capabilities across those environments.
This is especially useful for organizations that operate multiple datacenters, regional environments, business-unit-specific clusters, or separate Prism Central domains for operational, organizational, or lifecycle reasons.
At a high level, Intelligent Operations in NCM 2.0 helps teams move from isolated monitoring to centralized operations.
This model allows operations teams to reduce context switching, centralize visibility, and make better decisions across their Nutanix estate.
Before Intelligent Operations can provide visibility across multiple environments, Prism Central domains are onboarded into NCM as accounts.
Account onboarding provides a common workflow for adding Nutanix environments into the NCM operating model. Once a Prism Central domain is onboarded, Intelligent Operations can use that account as a source for inventory, alerts, events, anomalies, audits, capacity data, and reporting.
This simplifies the operational experience because administrators do not need to manage each Prism Central domain as a completely separate operational island. Instead, each onboarded account becomes part of the broader NCM view, and it also becomes available to all other NCM services.
Many enterprise environments are distributed across multiple Prism Central domains. This can happen for several reasons, including geography, scale, organizational boundaries, lifecycle management, or separation between production and non-production environments.
In earlier operating models, administrators often had to move between separate Prism Central instances to understand the health, capacity, and activity of each environment. NCM 2.0 improves this experience by enabling Intelligent Operations to work across multiple onboarded Prism Central domains.
Multi-Prism Central operations allow teams to:
This centralized model is useful for both day-to-day operations and higher-level planning. Operators can investigate specific entities, while infrastructure leaders can better understand trends across the broader environment.
Inventory Browser provides a centralized way to view infrastructure entities across onboarded Prism Central domains.
Instead of starting with a specific Prism Central instance and then searching within that environment, administrators can use Inventory Browser to search, filter, and inspect infrastructure objects from a broader NCM view.
Inventory Browser can help answer questions such as:
Inventory visibility is foundational to operations. Before teams can troubleshoot, plan, or automate, they need to understand what exists, where it exists, and how it is behaving.
In NCM 2.0, Inventory Browser provides this broader operational starting point.
Modern infrastructure generates a large amount of operational data. Alerts, events, anomalies, and audits are all useful, but they can become difficult to manage when viewed separately across multiple environments.
Signals provides a centralized operational view for key activity across the Nutanix environment.
Signals can include:
This helps administrators identify what is happening, where it is happening, and whether action is required.
Signals helps reduce operational fragmentation. Rather than treating each alert, event, or anomaly as a separate workflow, Intelligent Operations brings these operational indicators together so teams can investigate and respond more efficiently.
Alerts and events provide important information about infrastructure health, configuration changes, resource behavior, and operational activity.
Traditional monitoring tools can generate a large number of alerts, many of which may not require immediate action. This can lead to alert fatigue, where important issues are missed because they are buried among less critical notifications.
Intelligent Operations helps by centralizing alerts and events and placing them in the broader context of the environment. Administrators can use this information to understand what happened, where it happened, and which infrastructure objects were affected.
Alerts and events are also important inputs for automation. When paired with alert policies and Playbooks, they can trigger notifications, ticket creation, REST API calls, or other operational workflows.
Anomaly Detection helps identify behavior that falls outside expected operating patterns.
Traditional threshold-based monitoring is useful, but it can create noise when a workload normally operates at a high or low utilization level. For example, a database VM may normally run at high memory utilization because of caching. In that case, high memory usage alone may not indicate a problem. However, a sudden drop in memory usage could indicate that a service stopped or that behavior changed unexpectedly.
Anomaly Detection uses historical time-series data to establish a normal operating band for metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, latency, I/O, and other resource behaviors. When the observed value falls outside the expected band, the system can identify that behavior as anomalous.
This helps teams focus on abnormal behavior rather than static thresholds alone.
Examples include:
Anomaly Detection is especially useful because normal behavior is not the same for every workload. Some applications are quiet during the week and active on weekends. Others experience predictable spikes at the end of a reporting period. Intelligent Operations can use historical behavior to better distinguish between expected and unexpected activity.
Seasonality allows anomaly detection to account for recurring patterns.
Common seasonality examples include:
For example, a reporting workload may generate high I/O every weekend. A static threshold might flag that activity every time it happens. Anomaly Detection can learn that the weekend increase is expected and focus instead on behavior that falls outside the normal weekend pattern.
This helps reduce unnecessary alerts while still identifying unusual behavior.
Nutanix has historically used the Generalized Extreme Studentized Deviate Test to help determine expected behavior bands for anomaly detection.
A simple way to think about this is similar to a confidence interval. The system establishes an expected upper and lower range for a metric, then identifies values that fall outside that range.
The algorithm requires enough historical data to understand the relevant pattern.
This historical context is important because anomaly detection becomes more useful as it learns what normal behavior looks like for each workload.
Audits provide visibility into user and system activity across the environment.
While alerts and events help administrators understand infrastructure health and operational changes, audits help answer a different set of questions:
This information is important for troubleshooting, security reviews, compliance workflows, and operational accountability.
In distributed environments, audit visibility becomes especially important. When teams manage multiple Prism Central domains, it can be difficult to understand where a change occurred or which user initiated it if audit data must be reviewed separately in each environment.
With NCM 2.0, Intelligent Operations can provide a more centralized view of audit activity across onboarded environments. This allows administrators to review operational changes from a broader NCM interface instead of manually checking each Prism Central domain in isolation.
Audits are also useful during incident investigation. For example, if an alert is generated after a configuration change, an administrator can review audit activity to determine whether a user action may have contributed to the issue.
User-defined alert policies allow administrators to define custom alerting behavior based on operational requirements.
While built-in alerts and anomaly detection provide broad coverage, many organizations also need custom alerting rules for specific workloads, teams, or operating standards.
User-defined alert policies can be based on conditions such as:
These policies help teams align alerting behavior with their own service levels, escalation paths, and operational practices.
User-defined alert policies are also useful when combined with Playbooks. An alert policy can identify the condition, while a Playbook can define the response. This creates a more complete operational workflow from detection to action.
Capacity Planning helps administrators understand current resource consumption, future capacity needs, and the expected runway of clusters.
Instead of waiting until a cluster is nearly full, Intelligent Operations can help teams identify capacity constraints earlier and plan ahead.
Capacity Planning can help answer questions such as:
Cluster runway is a key concept. Runway estimates how long a cluster can continue operating before it reaches a capacity constraint. The limiting resource may be CPU, memory, storage, or another resource depending on the environment and workload profile.
Capacity Planning can also help identify top consumers. This allows administrators to understand which VMs, applications, or workloads are driving resource usage.
This visibility supports better planning decisions, such as:
In NCM 2.0, Capacity Planning becomes more useful because teams can review capacity and runway across onboarded Prism Central environments. This broader view helps administrators make placement and planning decisions across the Nutanix estate.
What-if planning helps teams model future capacity needs before making infrastructure changes.
For example, an administrator may want to know whether a cluster can support:
Rather than relying on manual calculations, what-if planning allows the team to estimate the impact of planned growth against available resources.
This helps teams avoid reactive capacity decisions and supports more predictable infrastructure planning.
Reporting helps teams communicate operational and capacity information to different audiences.
Operations teams may use reports to review infrastructure health and utilization. Infrastructure leaders may use reports to understand growth trends, capacity risk, or planning requirements. Application owners may use reports to understand how their workloads are consuming resources.
Reports can be useful for lots of operational activities including:
Reporting becomes especially valuable when combined with derived metrics. Instead of manually collecting data from different views, teams can use reports to summarize important operational information in a repeatable format.
Reports help turn infrastructure data into a communication tool. This supports better planning, better visibility, and more consistent operational reviews.
NCM 2.0 introduces out-of-the-box derived metrics that provide higher-level infrastructure and capacity insights.
A derived metric is calculated from one or more underlying metrics. Instead of only showing raw data points, derived metrics can combine, aggregate, or transform base metrics into more useful operational summaries.
Below is an image showing an example of some of these OOTB metrics beign added to a report.
Derived metrics can help summarize areas such as:
For example, a raw metric may show resource usage for an individual entity. A derived metric can help provide a higher-level view by aggregating or transforming that data into a more useful summary.
In NCM 2.0, out-of-the-box derived metrics provide a foundation for richer reporting and infrastructure analysis. They help administrators and stakeholders move from raw telemetry to more consumable operational insights.
Playbooks provide low-code or no-code automation for common operational workflows.
Playbooks were previously known as X-Play (pronounced cross-play). The core concept remains the same: an event or condition triggers a defined set of actions.
Event-driven automation follows a simple pattern:
event(s) → logic → action(s)
In IT operations, many workflows follow this pattern. For example:
Playbooks allow administrators to automate these repetitive workflows.
For some example playbooks that you can import into your own instance, check out the Playbooks Library on nutanix.dev!
Also, check out Getting Started with Nutanix X-Play for more examples and references.
Common Playbook use cases include:
The following image shows an example of some of the playbook actions available.
Playbooks are especially powerful when combined with Signals and user-defined alert policies.
This allows teams to move from detection to response in a consistent and repeatable way.
Many organizations use external systems for ticketing, CMDB, collaboration, incident response, or automation.
Playbooks can integrate with these external systems by using REST API actions. This allows Intelligent Operations to become part of a broader operational ecosystem.
For example, a Playbook could:
This is useful because infrastructure operations rarely happen in only one system. Alerts, tickets, ownership data, and remediation workflows often span multiple tools.
By using REST API actions, Playbooks can help keep those systems synchronized and reduce manual handoffs between teams.
The value of Intelligent Operations comes from connecting visibility, analysis, and automation.
Inventory Browser helps teams understand what exists.
Signals help teams understand what is happening.
Anomaly Detection and alert policies help teams identify what needs attention.
Capacity Planning and Reporting help teams understand trends and plan ahead.
Playbooks help teams automate the response.
Together, these capabilities help operations teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive and automated operations.
NCM Intelligent Operations helps infrastructure teams centralize visibility, analyze capacity, detect abnormal behavior, report on operational trends, and automate common workflows.
With NCM 2.0, Intelligent Operations supports operations across multiple onboarded Prism Central domains. This provides a broader and more unified view of Nutanix infrastructure.
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