NSX-T – How to figure out what those weird UUIDs really represent

If you’ve been running NSX-T for a while, you probably know that a lot of error messages and CLI lists contain UUIDs rather than the actual NSX-T object names.

One example below, where there is a ‘Partial Success’ on the realization of a segment/LS. The error message only lists the Transport Node’s UUID (1e107ae9-452b-4f12-b710-ef53934782c2). How do we know which Transport Node it’s referring to?

The solution is very simple: Just copy the UUID and paste it into the NSX-T search feature (the magnifying glass icon) that’s available in the top right hand corner of the web UI:

After filtering the search to only list Transport Nodes we can se that the node we were looking for was esx-04.

This search feature works for all types of NSX-T objects, and we can also search for IP addresses, host names, network names etc. Example below where we search for the esx-04 hostname and can list all its VMs etc.