Nutanix Application Discovery relies on a combination of Prism Central services and in-guest sensors that collect application metadata, communication patterns, and dependency maps. The internal documentation lists these specific prerequisites before Application Discovery can be enabled:

“Prism Central must have access to the Internet for sensor downloads, signature updates, and metadata service communication.”Application Discovery uses cloud-based metadata to identify applications and services. Without Internet access, Prism Central cannot retrieve application profiles, updated signatures, and dependency mapping definitions.

“The Network Controller service must be enabled to allow flow-level inspection and communication tracking between VMs.”Application Discovery integrates directly with Nutanix Flow’s Network Controller to observe traffic flows, which is required for dependency mapping. Without Network Controller enabled, Prism Central cannot monitor or analyze traffic between workloads.

The documentation clarifies that generating API keys is not required to activate Application Discovery, and sufficient Prism Central resources are already assumed as stated in the question.

Therefore, the required prerequisites are Internet connectivity and enabling the Network Controller.