What’s new in vRealize Log Insight 4.3: An in-depth review

We’re pleased to announce the new release of vRealize Log Insight 4.3. You can download the new release here.

vRealize Log Insight

Read on to learn more about vRealize Log Insight 4.3 !

Let’s begin with some overall changes in the Log Insight product …

LI primarily fixed a lot of bugs in this release and is fairly light in terms of new features compared to previous versions of vRealize L og Insight.
Support for vIDM single sign on.
Silent auto update of agents …

Moving on to some …

General Enhancements

In vRealize Log Insight v 4.3 you will notice a few UI enhancements like –

In vRealize Log Insight 4.0 we told you about the user alerts feature we introduced. The Ability for a user with admin permissions to Edit and Delete user alerts from administration UI. We have taken a step further and added alert history on an alert, where you click an icon and it will show you a history of when the alert fired last.

Single Alert history

You can click the > icon to see a bit more of the details or click the icon to run the alert query in Interactive Analytics to view all the details.

Alert history details

New percent labels on pie charts
- The percent label was asked for by the user community a lot and helps to slice the pie chart in percentages per slice.

Percent labels on Pie charts

New trendline overlay on line charts
- Trendline in a chart is a best-fit straight line that is useful for simple linear data sets. Trendlines usually show the if the value being monitored is increasing or decreasing at a steady rate.

Trendlines in linear charts

Enhanced dashboard list selection
- Another feature asked for a lot by the user community, as to how can I tell the dashboards that are available to me without having to click them one by one and one at a time ? – The dashboard accordion solves that issue and users can see all content packs that the user has access to and expand the one they are interested in still have all the others in the list…

Dashboard accordion layout

In addition to UI features we also released some Log Insight Server side features

Now supports VMware Identity Manager Single Sign-On (vIDM SSO); this feature was in Tech Preview or trial phase in the past release.

VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) Integration
- Authentication via vIDM can be configured allowing for Single Sign-On.
- Enable vIDM integration from Administration \ Authentication page UI and save.

vIDM authentication configuration

To be able to login via vIDM user you should import group or user from Administration -> Access Control page.

Limitations:

Host table entries now expire after they are idle for three months (after the last ingested event)
- User community has also requested that we clean up the host list for hosts that have not sent events in the last 3 months or more and we listened …. The host table will not show a host in the list as long as it has been 3 months or more since the last ingested event from the host.
New upgrade APIs
- We have released new APIs for upgrading vRealize Log Insight; details available along with the API documentation here.

And last but not the least we would like to call out some vRealize Log Insight Agent Features that made it into the 4.3 release

Agent auto-update

Note: if you want to opt out of this and do NOT want to enable auto-update of agents uou need to add “[update ]auto_update=No” to your agent configuration (in liagent.ini on every machine or instance where the agent is installed). In addition you still need to opt-out on the server-side for agents to NOT auto-update.

Enhanced timestamp parser that supports single-digit representation of days and months
Now supports Windows Server 2016

vRLI v4.3 compatibility with vSphere v6.5

vSphere 6.5 supports old interface that LI uses which means Log Insight version 3.0 and newer is compatible with vSphere 6.5
The vSphere content pack has now been updated for vSphere 6.5 specific logs!
Existing vSphere content pack widgets will continue to work with vSphere 6.5

vSphere 4.3 content pack