Nutanix AIops
Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nutanix. Product and trademark names belong to their owners. MIT licensed.
Governed AI-ops for Nutanix Prism Central (v4 REST API) — clusters, hosts,
VMs (AHV + ESXi), storage, network, catalog, data protection / DR, alerts, LCM
upgrades, and capacity — with a built-in governance harness: unified audit
log, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive
risk-tier labels. Connects to Prism Central on HTTPS :9440 with
HTTP Basic auth (username + encrypted password). Self-contained: no dependencies
beyond httpx and the MCP SDK.
Why this over a read-only Nutanix MCP
- Automatic ETag / If-Match on every mutation. The v4 API rejects an update
or delete without the entity's current ETag — the classic footgun. This tool
fetches and sends
If-Matchfor you. - Automatic pagination — list tools walk every v4 page for you, and return a
{"<items>": [...], "returned", "limit", "truncated"}envelope so a capped read announces itself instead of looking like the whole estate. - Absent is not empty — a field Prism Central did not return comes back as
null, never as"". v4 omits a lot of fields; the two facts stay distinct. - Mixed-hypervisor VM listing —
vm_listreturns both AHV and ESXi guests under the same Prism Central (built for hypervisor-migration estates). - Governance harness — audit / token+call budget / descriptive risk-tier labels / undo-token / prompt-injection sanitize, with dry-run + double-confirm on destructive writes.
What this tool does, and does not, decide
It delivers Nutanix Prism Central operations — reads and writes — accurately and efficiently, and records every one of them. It does not decide whether a write is allowed to happen. That is the agent's judgement, or the permission of the account you connect it with: connect with a Prism Central account holding only a read-only (Viewer) role, and the writes fail at the server — the place that actually owns the permission.
So there is no read-only switch, no policy file, no approval gate to configure. The
one thing the tool guarantees is that nothing is silent: every call, over MCP and
over the CLI alike, lands an audit row in ~/.nutanix-aiops/audit.db, and
destructive writes still capture their before-state and record an inverse where one
exists.
Each tool declares a
risk_level, carried into the audit row as a descriptive tier (none/confirm/review) — so a reviewer can see at a glance that a row was a high-risk delete. It is a label, not a gate.
Running a smaller / local model? See agent-guardrails.md — it lists the guardrails this tool now enforces for you (so you don't spend prompt budget restating them) and gives a ready-made system prompt for what's left.
Capability matrix (51 MCP tools)
| Group | Tools | Count | R/W |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clusters | cluster_list, cluster_health, host_list, cluster_utilization | 4 | 4 read |
| VMs | vm_list, vm_get, vm_power_on, vm_guest_shutdown, vm_power_off, vm_reboot, vm_create, vm_update, vm_clone, vm_delete, vm_migrate | 11 | 2 read · 9 write |
| Storage | storage_container_list / _create / _update / _delete | 4 | 1 read · 3 write |
| Network | subnet_list, subnet_get, subnet_create, subnet_delete | 4 | 2 read · 2 write |
| Catalog | image_list, image_delete, category_list, category_create, category_assign | 5 | 2 read · 3 write |
| Data protection / DR | snapshot_list / _create / _delete / _restore, recovery_point_list, protection_domain_list, vm_protect, pd_failover | 8 | 3 read · 5 write |
| Alerts | alert_list, event_list, audit_list, analyze_alert (RCA), alert_acknowledge, alert_resolve | 6 | 4 read · 2 write |
| LCM (upgrades) | lcm_inventory, lcm_precheck, lcm_update | 3 | 1 read · 2 write |
| Capacity | task_list, capacity_runway | 2 | 2 read |
| Diagnostics / RCA | cluster_health_rca, alert_triage_rca | 2 | 2 read |
| Undo | undo_list, undo_apply | 2 | 1 read · 1 write |
| Total | 51 | 24 read · 27 write |
Diagnostics / RCA are the flagship reads. cluster_health_rca ranks the whole
estate — degraded fault-tolerance state, storage pools and containers over 80%
(warning) / 90% (critical), nodes not healthy or missing from inventory —
worst-first, each finding citing the measured percentage or raw Prism state that
tripped it. alert_triage_rca groups active alerts by severity with a count per
level, flags unacknowledged criticals, and surfaces the oldest unresolved alert
with its age. Both are read-only (risk_level="low") and deterministic — no
clock, no randomness, same input → same answer. analyze_alert complements them
at the single-alert level: it correlates an alert with its related
events into a probable-cause + suggested-actions summary. High-risk writes
(vm_delete, vm_migrate, storage_container_delete, subnet_delete,
snapshot_delete, snapshot_restore, pd_failover, image_delete,
lcm_update) support dry_run and, at the CLI, double confirmation.
Install
uv tool install nutanix-aiops # or: pipx install nutanix-aiops
Quick start
nutanix-aiops init # wizard: PC host / port 9440 / username / verify_ssl + encrypted password
nutanix-aiops doctor # config, secrets, connectivity + REST-RBAC preflight
nutanix-aiops overview # one-shot estate summary
nutanix-aiops diagnose cluster-health # worst-first RCA: resiliency, storage, nodes
nutanix-aiops vm list # AHV + ESXi VMs
Run as an MCP server (stdio):
export NUTANIX_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD=... # unlock the encrypted secret store non-interactively
nutanix-aiops mcp
CLI
nutanix-aiops (Typer): init, overview, doctor, mcp; cluster list/health/hosts/util; vm list/get/power/delete/migrate (delete & migrate
take --dry-run + double confirm); diagnose cluster-health, diagnose alert-triage; secret set/list/rm/migrate/rotate-password.
The CLI is a convenience subset — the full 51-tool surface is via the MCP server.
Governance
Every MCP tool passes through the bundled @governed_tool harness:
- Audit — every call (params, result, status, duration, risk tier, and any
operator-supplied approver/rationale) is logged to
~/.nutanix-aiops/audit.db(relocatable viaNUTANIX_AIOPS_HOME). The CLI writes the same row the MCP path does — there is no unaudited entry point. - Runaway guard — a safety backstop, not an authorization gate: the same
call hammered in a tight loop trips a circuit breaker. Disable with
NUTANIX_RUNAWAY_MAX=0; optional hard ceilings viaNUTANIX_MAX_TOOL_CALLS/NUTANIX_MAX_TOOL_SECONDS. - Undo recording — reversible writes record an inverse descriptor built
from the fetched before-state (
vm_update→ prior CPU/memory,vm_migrate→ prior host). - Risk tier — a descriptive label on the audit row derived from
risk_level; it gates nothing.
Credentials
The Prism Central password is stored encrypted in
~/.nutanix-aiops/secrets.enc (Fernet + scrypt) — never plaintext on disk.
Unlock with a master password from NUTANIX_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD (MCP/CI) or an
interactive prompt (CLI). The non-secret connection details (host, port,
username, verify_ssl) live in ~/.nutanix-aiops/config.yaml. A legacy plaintext
env var NUTANIX_<TARGET>_PASSWORD is honoured as a fallback.
Gotcha: the Prism Central account needs REST API rights, not just Web UI access.
doctor's REST-RBAC preflight catches this early.
Supported scope & limitations
- Validation status. All behaviour is currently validated against mocked v4
REST responses; it has not yet been run against a live Prism Central. The
fastest live check is
nutanix-aiops doctor. Seedocs/VERIFICATION.mdfor the full live-verification checklist. - Self-testable free on Nutanix Community Edition (CE): a single-node CE cluster + an X-Small Prism Central VM.
- Least-verified paths: LCM update (
lcm_update), protection-domain failover (pd_failover), and ESXi-VM listing in particular need live validation. - Out of scope this release: IAM / users / roles, Files / Objects / Volumes services, reports, X-Play playbooks, and anything outside Prism Central v4.
Missing a capability?
Missing a tool, an API dialect, or a workflow? Open an issue or PR — feedback and contributions are welcome.