NSX Troubleshooting, what changed in the firewall?

I found a neat feature that I didn’t know in the NSX Manager during a late night. Every publish/change makes a configuration point, that you can see what changed from then -> now.

This can be good for troubleshooting, something that stops working, that might be due to a DFW Configuration issue.

Go to the DFW, over the categories click “Actions” -> Under Drafts click “View” You will be presented with the saved configurations:

So lets go into troubleshooting mode, and lets say something stopped working at 10:32. I can find the date in the above screenshot and point at the dots and see the timestamps - look below:

If I open that, i can see the sections that contains changes, and what changed that will be, added/modified/removed if i load that config.

So whats visible here?

• What saved it (Would properly be System)
• The user that did it
• Modified time

What are the draft changes?

• The sections that contain changes.
• If you expand the section you can see the “Red/Green/Orange” symbol to the left that tells if the rule is getting created/removed.

Remember it dosent show that a rule was created as “Added” but “Deleted”. That’s because you will delete the rule when you load the config.

If we click load as you can see below you will be prompted and warned that you will do a full replace of the FW.

Doing that will as the warning say put you back to the DFW - where you can decide to Publish, make some changes or revert.