The micro-segmentation recommendations that the NSX Intelligence feature generates include security policies, policy security groups, and services for applications.

Feature Overview

The NSX Intelligence recommendations are based on the network traffic flow patterns that occurred between the compute members of a selected policy group, VMs, or physical servers. The recommendations can assist you with enforcing a more dynamic security policy by correlating traffic patterns of communication that have occurred within your NSX environment.

  • The security policy recommendations are of the East-West distributed firewall (DFW) security policies in the application category.

  • The security group recommendations consist of the VMs or physical servers whose traffic flows were analyzed for the time period and the boundary you had specified.

  • The service recommendations are service objects that were used by applications in the VMs or physical servers that you had specified, but the services are not yet defined in the NSX inventory.

Workflow for Generating a Recommendation

There are multiple ways to request the NSX Intelligence recommendations, but the most straightforward way is by using the Plan & Troubleshoot > Recommendations tab and clicking Start New Recommendation.

You provide the following input when requesting for an NSX Intelligence recommendation to be generated.

  • Any compute entities (groups, VMs, or physical servers) or existing distributed firewall (DFW) section in your NSX environment.

  • Time range in which the network traffic flows are to be analyzed for the provided compute entities or existing security policy rules.

For the existing rules, the system can recommend updates that can be made to rules in that section in order to plug any leaks detected for ingress, egress, or intra-application flows between the workloads. See Generate a New NSX Intelligence Recommendation for more information.

After the recommendation analysis is finished, you can view the details of the recommendation and, if necessary, modify the recommendation before publishing it. See Review and Publish Generated NSX Intelligence Recommendations for details.

You can also export a generated NSX Intelligence recommendation into a JSON-formatted file or a CSV-formatted file. If necessary, modify that JSON file using an external REST API tool before submitting it to NSX Policy Manager for processing. For more information, see Export an NSX Intelligence Recommendation as a JSON File and Export an NSX Intelligence Recommendation as a CSV File.