Hands on with VMware vCenter Log Insight

VMware recently released a beta version of their new offering, VMware vCenter Log Insight.   The product enables you to easily perform advanced analytics on log data aggregated across your physical, virtualised and cloud infrastructure.  I'm not going to go through the process of installing the appliance as Florian Grehl has a great getting started guide to help you out.  What I plan on doing is showing you how I use the product within my lab.

I currently have vCenter Log Insight aggregating the following device logs:

3 x ESXi Hosts and vCenter 5.1 Update 1a

1 x Synology DS412+ NAS

1 x Linksys SRW2016 Gigabit Switch

I've created my own Dashboard which shows the the following statistics:

Total Events (Part of the vSphere content pack)

Number of host errors grouped by host (Part of the vSphere content pack)

Number of vCenter errors grouped by host (Part of the vSphere content pack)

Synology Errors (Simple search for "SYNOLOGY")

Linksys Errors (Simple search for "10.1.2.2")

From what I've seen so far this is a very good product and definitely something to have in your arsenal for those times when your trying to troubleshoot your environment.  When I've got a few more resources in my home lab I'll look at getting this integrated with vCenter Operation Manager.  If you want more information David Davis from Trainsignal has a video series up already so go check it out.