Management, Operations, and Monitoring
Management planes
This domain tests day-to-day operations. Prism Element manages a single cluster: VMs, storage, hardware, alerts, and local tasks. Prism Central manages multiple clusters and adds categories, RBAC, Calm, Leap, Flow, and Objects. NCC runs health checks for configuration and best practices. Pulse sends diagnostics to Nutanix support and is recommended but not required for the cluster to run. LCM coordinates firmware and software updates. nCLI supports automation and scripted checks.
Operational workflow
Use Prism to review alerts and events, identify the affected node or disk, and confirm with NCC. For a disk failure, locate the physical slot in the hardware view, replace the disk, and let Curator rebuild. Use categories to group VMs for policy, and RBAC to limit administrative scope. After upgrades, re-run NCC and verify alerts are cleared.
Worked example
A cluster raises a disk-failure alert. Prism Element shows the node and slot; NCC confirms the disk is unhealthy. You replace the disk, and Curator rebuilds redundancy in the background. You then verify that the alert clears and that capacity and resiliency return to the expected state. No VM downtime is required if the cluster maintained N+1.
Traps
Prism Central is not in the data path; a PC outage does not stop cluster I/O. Pulse is not required for alerts or normal operation. NCC is a health-check tool, not a performance benchmark. Do not ignore repeated alerts or disable monitoring to silence symptoms.