Nutanix

Dashboards for the health, capacity and performance of Nutanix clusters, hosts, VMs and storage containers, with their alerts and events. The plugin reads everything from Prism Central's API. Nothing is installed on the clusters. The plugin does not connect to Prism Element.

Requirements

• Grafana 12.4 or later.
• A Prism Central that serves the Nutanix v4.0 API or the v3 API, reachable from Grafana.
• A Prism Central account with the Prism Viewer role, described below.

Getting started

1. Create a credential. Use an API key on a Prism Central that serves v4.0. Use a username and password on one that serves only v3. The account needs the Prism Viewer role and no other. Credentials, below, has the steps.

2. Add the data source. In Grafana, go to Connections, then Data sources, and add Nutanix. Enter the Prism Central address, usually https://<prism-central>:9440. Under Authentication, choose API key or Username and password and enter the credential. Save & test reports the number of clusters and the Prism Central version.

3. Import the dashboards. On the data source's settings page, open the Dashboards tab and select Import beside each dashboard. Start with Nutanix Cluster Overview.

If a private certificate authority signed the certificate at the Prism Central URL, paste that authority's certificate as the CA certificate. Skip TLS certificate validation connects without verifying the certificate.

To try the plugin without a Prism Central, turn on Demo mode in the data source settings. It serves sample data for three clusters and sends nothing over the network.

If Grafana cannot reach Prism Central directly, use Grafana's secure SOCKS proxy or Private Data Source Connect. The proxy or agent needs to reach Prism Central only.

Credentials

Prism Viewer is the narrowest built-in role that covers every request the plugin makes. Use an account created for the plugin.

API key

Prism Central issues API keys to service accounts only. Service accounts, keys and their role are created through the Nutanix IAM v4.0 API, by a Prism Admin or Super Admin. Nutanix's API key walkthrough shows the requests.

1. Create a service account. Call createUser with userType set to SERVICE_ACCOUNT.

2. Create an API key for it. Call createUserKey with a name and keyType set to API_KEY. Prism Central returns the key value once.

3. Give the service account the Prism Viewer role. Call createAuthorizationPolicy with the Prism Viewer role, the service account as its identity, and every entity in scope. The walkthrough's example assigns Super Admin. Assign Prism Viewer.

Paste the key into the data source's API key field.

Username and password

A Prism Central that serves only v3 cannot issue API keys. Create a Prism Central user for the plugin, give it the Prism Viewer role, and enter its username and password.

Dashboards

Dashboard	Shows	Select
Nutanix Cluster Overview	What needs attention across every cluster, and how each is running	One cluster, or All
Nutanix Host Performance	The hosts of one cluster	A cluster, and its hosts
Nutanix VM Performance	The VMs of one cluster, or of one host	A cluster, optionally a host, VMs
Nutanix Storage and Capacity	One storage container's capacity, efficiency and performance	A cluster, and a storage container
Nutanix Alerts and Events	Open alerts, and events over the time range	Every cluster, or one

Each dashboard has a Data source selector. With one data source per Prism Central, the same five dashboards serve all of them.

Cluster Overview opens with an estate summary of open alerts, cluster fault tolerance and degraded hosts. Below it is one row per selected cluster, with health, capacity, CPU, memory and storage I/O. The rows start collapsed. Host Performance repeats its panels for each selected host and ranks the hosts by CPU utilization. VM Performance covers CPU, memory, disk and network for the selected VMs. Storage and Capacity also lists the cluster's disks.

Alerts show what is open now, whatever the time range. Events and statistics follow it. The four performance dashboards open on the last 6 hours, and Alerts and Events on the last 24 hours.

The dashboards refresh every minute. Refresh should be set at one minute or longer for larger deployments.

Importing a dashboard again from the Dashboards tab replaces the copy in Grafana. When customizing one, save a copy and edit that.

Data source settings

Maximum entities per query caps the rows an inventory, alerts, events or raw query returns, the hosts a host stats query reads, and the entries a template variable lists. The default is 1,000. A query that reaches the cap shows the capped rows with a notice saying so.

Alert rules

The plugin includes the two alert rules below, as a provisioning file at alerting/nutanix.yaml in the plugin's directory. On a Grafana you run yourself, copy it into Grafana's provisioning/alerting directory, set the environment variable NUTANIX_DATASOURCE_UID to the Nutanix data source's uid, and restart Grafana. Grafana Cloud does not read provisioning files. There, create the rules through the alerting provisioning API or Terraform.

Rule	Fires when	Checked every	For	Severity
Host degraded	Prism Central reports a host as degraded. One alert per host	5m	15m	warning
Cluster below desired fault tolerance	A cluster tolerates fewer failures than its desired fault tolerance. One alert per cluster	5m	15m	critical

Cluster below desired fault tolerance also fires when Prism Central returns no clusters or cannot be queried. Host degraded does not. Both rules carry the labels severity and source=nutanix.

A Grafana alert rule can query Cluster stats, Host stats, VM stats, Storage container stats and Alert count. Alert count returns one number, such as the open critical alerts.

An Inventory query can back a rule when Columns holds exactly one numeric column, with the text columns that name the entity. Each row is then one alert instance. degraded on hosts and faultToleranceDeficit on clusters are numeric columns for this.

Template variables

For building your own dashboards. Create each as a Query variable on the Nutanix data source.

Entity type	Cluster	Host
Cluster
Host	$cluster
VM	$cluster	$host
Storage container	$cluster
Disk	$cluster

Leave Cluster or Host empty to list across every cluster or host.

Support

Email helpdesk@integrationplumbers.io.

Use of the plugin is subject to the Integration Plumbers acceptable use policy.