Wouldn't it be awesome if your system could detect anomalies automatically so
that you could take appropriate actions? With anomaly detection you can do that,
so let me show you how that works.
Hi, thank you for tuning in to another Tech TopX video.
I'm Sharon Santana and I'm a technical marketing engineer at Nutanix.
I don't know if you're aware that Prism Central is equipped with machine
learning capabilities that include tools to help you identify abnormal behavior,
analyze resource utilization over time, monitor resource consumption, as well as
help plan for future resources. The purpose of the anomaly detection tool as
its name may suggest, is to let you know when there are anomalies happening in
the system so you can take appropriate actions. Prism Central achieves this
by constantly analyzing VM data in order to establish what we call a "normal
behavioral band". Then it records whenever there is an instance in performance or
maybe metrics that falls outside of the norm. But that's enough talk, let me show
you how it works. Here we have the Prism Central home screen. As you can see, this
Prism Central instance is managing three clusters: Astro, Bianca, and Ceres.
I have created a cluster information dashboard so that we can more easily see
the anomalies in each. As you can see, the Ceres and Bianca clusters currently
have zero anomalies reported for the past 24 hours, while the Astra cluster
has 19. If we care about viewing anomalies that are outside the past 24
hours we can go ahead and still click on the objects for anomalies and clear the
filter. This will show us all of the anomalies for that cluster. Let me go
back to our cluster information dashboard so that we can explore the 19
anomalies reported in the Astra cluster. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on that.
These are all of the anomalies reported in the past 24 hours for this cluster.
Let's explore the CPU usage anomaly. If you click right on the anomaly entity or
object you can see that the CPU usage was sustained at about roughly 8%.
However, on January 25th you can see that it spiked to 39.375% which is abnormal.
If you don't think that a CPU usage of 39.375% is abnormal you can
simply go to alert settings, and set up your alert for this type of anomaly.
So say instead of throwing warnings, you want to receive critical alerts, you can
simply click on this drop-down menu and select critical. Say that you consider an
alert critical if it is greater than 80% of CPU utilization. You can make
this change by simply changing the number in this text field. Notice that
you can also change the time for which this condition has to persist. By default
it is ten minutes, however you can choose anywhere from 0 to 30 minutes
from this drop-down menu. Keep in mind that each alert has its own set of
parameters and you can change them accordingly. If you decide that this CPU
usage policy is not needed in your environment you can also go ahead and
turn it off by disabling the policy and clicking save. To exit out of the CPU
usage anomaly view that we clicked on earlier, you can simply click on the X
button at the top right corner and it will drop you back in the table that
contains all of the anomalies for the past 24 hours.
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