NSX Intelligence is a security analytics engine that delivers granular security and segmentation, simplifying policy compliance and streamlining security operations. NSX Intelligence is a security analytics tool that can help understand your component flows and recommend firewall rules. NSX Intelligence heavily benefits from the distributed nature of NSX. Because NSX is already built into the kernel of the hypervisor and seeing traffic from virtual machines, NSX Intelligence has insights to provide recommended Distributed Firewall rule sets. The distributed and built in nature of NSX Intelligence means it can provide insights and metrics that no other security analytics tool can match without duplicating traffic to send external for inspection – causing extraneous overhead and using expensive hardware that has problems scaling.
Using NSX Intelligence, we can visualize flows and groups in the datacenter with stateful Layer 7 inspection and workload context, eliminating security blind spots and accelerating incident remediation. Cut external security tools and better utilize NSX security tools with recommendations from NSX Intelligence.
NSX Intelligence Requirements
- NSX Intelligence Requirements NSX Application Platform is needed to do the initial deployment of NSX Intelligence. NAPP should be already built in your lab, but may still be in progress. We’ll check this before activating NSX Intelligence.
- Certain license levels are required for NSX Intelligence. Since this is a security analytics tool, NSX Intelligence comes with the security focused license packages. You can see more detailed information about licensing here.
- NSX Intelligence also requires certain browsers and can only support a maximum number of ESXi, workload VMs or traffic flows. Read about these limits here.
NAPP is a pre-req to using NSX Intelligence. We’ll ensure NAPP is in a healthy state before activating NSX Intelligence in the lab.
Login to NSX Manager
- Enter User name
- Enter Password
- Click LOG IN
Navigate to NSX Application Platform (NAPP) and ensure platform is stable
1.Click System System
2.Click NSX Application Platform NSX Application Platform
3.Validate that NAPP is in Stable Stable status
Activate NSX Intelligence
- Use the scroll bar on the right to scroll down to the Features section of the NSX Application Platform Page
- Hover over the NSX Intelligence Section and click Activate to activate NSX Intelligence
Run Prechecks for NSX Intelligence
Activate NSX Intelligence
Verify NSX Intelligence Activation is In Progress
Once activated give 10 to 30 minutes time for Intelligence to get into action
NSX Intelligence should be fully activated now. If not, wait a few minutes for it to complete its activation process.
- Click on System System
- Click on NSX Application Platform NSX Application Platform
- Use the scroll bar scroll bar to navigate down to the Features section of the page
- Verify that the NSX Intelligence Status is green and reporting UP
- Click Go To NSX Intelligence Go To NSX Intelligence
Or NSX Intelligence can also be accessed directly Navigating to Plan & Troubleshoot > Discover & Take Action.
Click Refresh to View to load NSX Intelligence
You will start seeing your application workloads and traffic flow visualization
In ideal circumstances give 10 to 30 days of discovery time before micro-segmenting applications.
That’s it for this blog. Look for how to micro-segment application demo in another blog post.