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VMware Cloud Director Log Integration with Log Insight

VMware vRealize Log Insight delivers automated log management through aggregation, analytics, and search, enabling operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility in dynamic hybrid cloud environments. The VMware vRealize Log Insight content pack compliments the vSphere content pack and provides you with unparalleled visibility into your vCD environment. Now in version 8.0 and newer you can utilize the VMware vRealize Log Insight Agent on your vCD device to improve usability and administrative overhead! Additionally, this version of the Content Pack fully supports enabling of debug level logging!

This VMware VMware Cloud Director (vCD) content pack for vCD provides you with information from vCD that will help you to have a more thorough understanding about the health and operational status of your private cloud. Using it you will provide you with:

Detailed vApp activity information: This content pack will give you visibility into what vApp operations are happening and when to show you load as well as usage trends.

Consolidated operational overview: Have a clear picture of the overall health of your vCD environment and find problematic areas that you did not know existed.

Robust alerting: Capitalize on a collection of alerts built by an experienced cloud team to help you quickly detect and respond to issues in your environment when something goes wrong.

Install VMware Cloud Director Content Pack

To Install the Content Pack for VMware Cloud Director, Click on the Content Pack Tile in vRealize Log Insight GUI and search for Cloud Director in Marketplace.

Install the VMware – vCloud Director Content Pack displayed from Market place

This will install the Content Pack and you can see the new Agent Group created under Administration – Agent’s menu.

Configure Log Insight Agent in vCD Appliance

As vCloud Director is a Linux Appliance you can forward the specific files to your preferred SYSLOG server using rsyslog which is default log forwarding daemon. Here we are installing and configuring the vRealize Log Insight Agent to send the preferred Log files to Log Insight Server.

After installing the Content Pack, you can see the new Agent listed under Agents

By default, this Agent only have VMware Cloud director service logs, and which is necessary for us.

So, I would like to copy this Agent Group template and update with other log directories as well like Appliance logs, VCD API-Call Logs, PostgreSQL Database Logs.

Also update the Agent configuration like below and the save the new template

[filelog|vcd]
directory=/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs
include=vcloud-container-debug*;upgrade*;vmware-vcd-support*;watchdog*;vcloud-container-info*;cell*;request.log*;cell-management-tool.log*;cell-runtime.log*;cell.log*;cloud-proxy.log*;queries*;networking.log*;server-group-communications.log*;upgrade-*;service-wiring.log*;statsfeeder.log*;networking-wire.log*
event_marker=(\d{2}|\d{4})-\d{2}-\d{2}\s\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2},\d{3}\s
tags={"vmw_product":"vcd"}

[filelog|vcd-API]
directory=/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs
include=*request.log*
event_marker=\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b
tags={"vmw_product":"vcd"}

[filelog|vcd-appliance]
directory=/opt/vmware/var/log/vcd
include=*.log*
tags={"vmw_product":"vcd-appliance"}

[filelog|vcd-vpostgres]
directory=/var/vmware/vpostgres/10/pgdata/log
include=*.log*
tags={"vmw_product":"vcd-vpostgres"}

Now download the Agent Version from the Agent group created and select for the Linux RPM based installer.

Transfer this RPM file to the VMware Cloud Director Cells and make this as executable using below command

chmod +x filename.rpm

Then use below command to install the RPM in each cell.

rpm -ivh filename.rpm

To review the configuration file run the below command. Also verify the Log Insight Server FQDN, Protocol and the logs you will be forwarding to SYSLOG.

sudo vi /var/lib/loginsight-agent/liagent.ini

Run below command to restart the Agent

sudo systemctl restart liagentd

And run below command to start this agent while appliance startup

sudo systemctl enable liagentd

Run below command to check the service status.

sudo systemctl status liagentd

You can see the Agents Group will display now the agents’ forwarding logs via cfapi and Details of vMware Cloud Director Environment in Dashboard.

Also, I have downloaded some screenshots from VMware Marketplace, and this will show how the dashboard will look like after the integration.

Thanks,

If you have any comments, please drop me a line.
I hope this article was informative, and don’t forget to buy me a coffee if you found this worth reading.



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