In my last post, I covered how you can gain access to the latest version of vRealize Operations (formerly vCenter Operations Management Suite) before it’s available to download by using the VMware Hands On Labs (HoL). In that article, I walked you through how VMware’s HoL offers 6 different labs around the vRealize Operations Insight (vROI) bundle. Of course, vROI is made up of vRealize Operations (vROps) and Log Insight (LI). It was through those labs that I discovered a very cool lab that walks you through how to configure the new integration between vROps and LI as well as how to use the LI and vROps integration to troubleshoot vSphere and Windows Server performance issues. Specifically, that lab is HOL-SDC-1426 – Log Insight in the Real World!
Integrating vROps and LI
I’m not going to demonstrate how to access and login to the HoL as I’m sure you can figure that out. Once you access lab HOL-SDC-1426, one of the first things that you’ll need to do is to perform Log Insight configuration. That’s easy if you follow the lab guide. What I thought was interesting was how, during the Log Insight configuration, you configure Log Insight and vSphere integration by …
As you can see, you tell Log Insight about vCenter and can tell it to collect both vCenter logs, tasks, and alarms as well as ESXi hosts log. By collecting not only the structured vCenter data (like we usually do when we monitor vCenter) but also the unstructured data – that can be used to give us much more insight into what’s happening at the host level. By having such detailed information readily available, you’ll be more proactive and be able to solve more problems before they happen and troubleshoot problems that do happen, much faster.
After performing the integration above, I learned that the vCenter events, tasks, and alarms will be sent to Log Insight (as will ESXi host logs) but to send vCenter server log data to Log Insight, a script must be run. William Lam’s blog post on Forwarding Logs from the vCloud Suite to Log Insight makes this easy. I put the script on my vCenter Server Appliance (in the lab of course) and it worked magic for me!
After running the above command, our vCenter is now sending logs to Log Insight.
To receive all the logs, you also need to enable the redirection of the logs from vCenter Operations Manager to Log Insight (Note that the LI product UI in the lab still uses the old name of vROps, i.e. vCenter Operations). The redirection is done by transferring authorization keys and then running the vC Ops (aka vROps) syslog redirection script (information on how to do this is in the lab).
Next, you tell Log Insight how to access vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops/vROps) by registering the vC Ops host and then telling it to enable alerts and enable “launch in context”, like this-
With these configurations done, Log Insight is successfully integrated with vCenter and vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops/vROps) in terms of both structured and unstructured data.
Integrating Log Insight and Microsoft Windows and Active Directory
Want to send Windows events to Log Insight? It’s really pretty easy. Log Insight offers a small agent that you install on your Windows servers to send those Windows events to Log Insight. The agent download is available in the Agents section of the Log Insight web console.
Another common Windows-related configuration is connecting Log Insight and Windows Active Directory for authentication/authorization of Windows users/groups to access Log Insight.
From here, the lab walks you through…
- Sending syslogs from Linux to Log Insight
- Importing the vCenter Operations Manager Content Pack
- Troubleshooting performance problems in vSphere with Log Insight
- Troubleshooting Windows Server issues with Log Insight
You can view the complete lab manual for this lab is available on the HOL-SDC-1426 lab page or try out the lab for yourself at Log Insight in the Real World!
