The NSX Intelligence visualization canvas is composed of the groups or compute entities, and the network traffic flows that occurred with those groups or compute entities during the selected time period.

When you activate the NSX Intelligence application, the supported groups are those with member types that are either VMs, physical servers, IP addresses, or a combination of those compute entities.

Important:

The visualization shown for a selected time period represents all the network traffic flows and workload activities that occurred in your NSX environment during the selected time period. These activities include the addition, removal, or movement of compute entities (VMs, physical servers, IP address sets) and groups. It is possible that a VM appears more than once in the visualization. For example, if a VM was deployed on an ESXi host that was originally unmanaged and the host becomes managed by a VMware vCenter Server® during the selected time period, the VM appears twice in the Computes view. Similarly, if an ESXi host is disconnected from the VMware vCenter and added back during the same selected time period, the VMs deployed on the host appear as both deleted and new during the selected time period. In the Groups view, if a VM was in the Uncategorized group and added to a group during the same selected time period, the VM appears in both the Uncategorized group and in its new group.

The NSX Intelligence feature supports groups with VMs, physical servers, or IP addresses only. If groups have any other member types, the Groups view might show only the correlated traffic flows between the groups with supported member types, instead of the actual groups in the security rule.

The visualization graph that is on display gets refreshed as the security posture changes in your NSX environment. For example, if a new group gets added, a new group node gets displayed on the visualization canvas without requiring you to refresh your web browser. The Refresh status section in the upper-right section of the virtualization canvas shows when the view was last refreshed.

To learn more about working with the Groups view, Computes view, and the different types of traffic flows that you see in the visualization canvas, see the other topics provided in this section.