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
As a Claude Code plugin
One install gives an agent both the skill and the MCP server:
/plugin marketplace add AIops-tools/marketplace
/plugin install nutanix-aiops@aiops-tools
The MCP server is fetched with uv and pinned to the
package version this plugin declares, so an audit row can be traced back to the
code that wrote it. Credentials are still configured with nutanix-aiops init — see below.
As an OpenClaw plugin
The same bundle is published on ClawHub, where one install delivers the skill and its MCP server together:
openclaw plugins install clawhub:@zw008/nutanix-aiops
openclaw skills info nutanix-aiops # expect: Visible to model: yes
Restart the OpenClaw gateway afterwards so it loads the plugin. The MCP server is
fetched with uv, pinned to this exact release, so
uvx has to be on PATH — without it the skill still installs but reports
Visible to model: no. Credentials are configured exactly as below.
As a CLI or standalone MCP server
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
Where that password then lives: an exported variable is readable by every process this shell starts and is recorded by shell history. On a shared or long-lived host, prefer the interactive prompt, or inject it from a secret manager for the life of the one command that needs it.
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.