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Last week, VMware has announced its latest analytics product: VMware vCenter Log Insight. Part of VMware vCenter, delivers automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search, extending VMware’s leadership in analytics to log data.

The product enables you to easily perform advanced analytics on log data aggregated across your physical, virtualized and cloud infrastructure, leading to across the board improvements in IT metrics. Log Insight is fully integrated with vCenter Operations, and the technology behind it is from our Pattern Insight acquisition last year.

Log-Insight

More information coud be find in this post: Introducing VMware vCenter Log Insight.

Actually it’s in beta version and could be downloaded here in the common OVA format.

The virtual appliance is composed by thee different VMDK files:

  • 12 GB
  • 120 GB
  • 256 GB!

Also the appliance itself requires 8 GB of vRAM (but is aligned with other VMware appliances):

Log-Insight-Resources

Deployment is quite easy and faster:

Log-Insight-Deploy

After that you will have a VM ready to run. Note that it’s based on SuSE Linux, but the splash screen has been modified (probably it’s a new appliance template):

Log-Insight-Boot

After the first bootstrap you have only to connect to the web page and go through the configuration wizard.

Log-Insight-Console

Configuration steps are almost easy and after that the appliace is ready:

Log-Insight-Config Log-Insight-Config-1 Log-Insight-Config-2 Log-Insight-Config-3 Log-Insight-Config-4 Log-Insight-Config-5 Log-Insight-Config-6

As usual, it’s based on a dashboard concept where you can have aggregated information (note that it can collect also info from vCenter Server and Operation Manager, so not only syslog messages):

Log-Insight-Dashboard

Quite interesting and powerful the “Extract field” feature to analyze the logs

Log-Ingight-Extracted-Field

But of course this is a 1.0 release so it cannot (yet) be comparable with other tools (like, for example, Splunk). Anyway it’s a better solution compared to the basis ESXi syslog collector and almost well integrated with other VMware products.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.