The recently released vRealize Automation 6.1+ Content Pack was designed based on versions 6.1 and 6.2. See the announcement made by Steve Flanders last week.
Given the many different possible components of a vRealize Automation implementation, collecting and collating logs can be a challenge. This content pack will help bring views of all logs together and provide a view across all components within a single UI and query tool. In this article, we will explore the details of the content pack in more depth. The content pack includes dashboards for the following:
- General Overview – Get an overall sense of usage and event volume across components
- General Problems – Queries and alerts to help you keep your vRealize Automation environment running smoothly and troubleshoot specific issues
- SSO – For the Identity VA, the vCenter embedded SSO, or SSO installed on Windows, to capture authentication logs and errors
- vRealize Automation Appliance – Events by tenant, CAFE sub-components, and for service catalog
- vRealize Automation IaaS – Queries for the IaaS components running on one or more Windows hosts in your vRealize Automation environment, and IaaS workflow
- vRealize Automation Tomcat – General Tomcat log overview
- vRealize Automation Notification – Warnings specific to notification service by recipients, tenants, business groups
- Application Services – Events by node, task, and user for application services
- Telemetry (for vRealize Automation 6.2+ only) – Queries designed to extract specific system configuration information over time
- vRealize Orchestrator – Content for vRealize Orchestrator which can be from the embedded instance on the vRealize Automation virtual appliance, or an external instance
- vRealize Code Stream – Content for Code Stream
General Overview Dashboard
The overview dashboard displays events and workflows from different components, which indicate overall system usage / volume over time. You can visualize, using side-by-side dashboards, DEM events relative to IaaS workflow execution. Similarly, you can see the volume of vRealize Automation CAFE events relative to Tomcat events to get an idea of the overall system activity.
General Problems Dashboard
The vRealize Automation Problems dashboard has queries and alerts for some very common issues. In a healthy environment, widgets in this dashboard should return no results. Some of the queries and alerts I have found most useful in my own lab/demo environments include:
- Certificate issues – see which hosts are reporting untrusted certificate issues.
- Timebombs – queries are included to report errors that often are triggered by the expired solution user for a given tenant, or for the default tenant (links to KBs are included for resolution).
- Windows host near or out of space – IIS, by default, does not truncate or rotate its logs. It’s possible, therefore, that they can consume all available disk space on your Windows host for the IaaS web services. If this occurs, the Infrastructure tab becomes inaccessible, and the IaaS Request forms will not be displayed when requesting a new catalog Item based on an IaaS blueprint. I highly recommend you configure this alert to send email notifications if it finds any results. This is by far one of the most useful alerts in my experience.
- License expired – in lab, POC or test environments that may have been configured with expiring license keys, this can be quite helpful.
Below is a sample email alert I received just today for one of the internal environments I monitor:
SSO Dashboard
Focusing on SSO logs, this dashboard will report issues around authentication and login details. You can find side-by-side dashboards for:
- Successful and failed logins by tenant
- Failed authentication and logins over time
From a troubleshooting perspective, there are dashboards and queries that help find issues caused by Active Directory configuration, such as:
- Duplicated group DNs (caused by cyclical dependencies)
- Invalid groups (ie protected groups)
- Act As token invalid (caused by trailing spaces in group names, which was an error in earlier versions of vRealize Automation/SSO)
Some of the other very helpful saved queries include:
- Authentication failed by tenant
- Authentication failed by user
- SSO Error events by error code
- Solution User password expiry
vRealize Automation Appliance Dashboard
This set of dashboards reports on vRealize Automation virtual appliance event logs, primarily coming from the Catalina.out log generated by the CAFE services. This includes events, errors and warnings per tenant, per sub-component (specific CAFE services), and by message type.
vRealize Automation IaaS Dashboard
The IaaS dashboard reports on logs coming from all of the IaaS components (whether they are co-located or distributed). Many of these dashboards focus on IaaS workflow executions – scheduled, executed, and failures. There is also information about data collection workflows reported here.
vRealize Automation Tomcat Dashboard
The Tomcat dashboard is specific to the instance on the vRA CAFE Appliance(s) which can help troubleshoot …
vRealize Automation Notification Dashboard
The Notification dashboards are focused on issues specifically with the CAFE service which sends and receives email notifications. This includes email host connectivity issues, errors per tenant recipients, and notification scenario events.
vRealize Automation Application Services Dashboard
When implemented, the Application Services functionality runs on it’s own virtual appliance and reports events in its own logs. These dashboards show App Services events over time, by host node (i.e. other hosts in the vRealize Automation environment which App Services may interact with), and by tasks. There are also dashboards for reporting events per deployed VM and deployments per user (requestor).
vRealize Automation Telemetry Dashboard
The Telemetry dashboard is only applicable to vRealize Automation 6.2 or newer. Certain data is periodically added to the log files about how the system is configured. There is other telemetry data, which is captured in log bundle collection but is not included in the logs, and therefore not reported within the content pack queries. Telemetry log entries are specifically flagged, so the dashboards in this section focus specifically on these
Some of the key data includes:
- Number of active business groups
- Number of active entitlements
- Number of active approval policies
vRealize Orchestrator Dashboard
This is the first iteration of a vRealize Orchestrator dashboard for Log Insight. Minor changes to the log format have improved the ability to query data from the vRealize Orchestrator logs, specifically related to workflow execution. There are two separate queries here based on workflows – one specifically for vRealize Automation stub callouts and one for general vRealize Orchestrator workflows. The primary difference is that the former filters out logs to the standard stub workflows (ie Workflow Runner) so you see less noise and can focus on the actual detailed workflow executions from these wrappers. All workflows are included the later query, which are grouped by the wrapper workflow rather than the called workflow.
vRealize Code Stream Dashboard
vRealize Code Stream 1.0 was released at the same time as vRealize Automation 6.2. It utilizes the same Catalina log as vRealize Automation for most of it’s logging, but we have extracted queries specific to Code Stream services here.
Downloading and Configuring
The content pack is available from the in-product Log Insight marketplace or on VMware Solution Exchange. If you are looking for information on how to configure vRealize Automation components to log to Log Insight, see the Resources section of the Solution Exchange listing.
