VMware just announced their 2.0 version of Log Insight last week and for a logging product, it’s pretty cool.  Let’s face it, most of us don’t get up every morning and rush to our computer to check out the newest logging software on the market, but VMware Log Insight is still neat.

 Installation

The VMware Log Insight 2.0 product was shockingly easy to install for log management system.  In my experience, logging software makes you jump through so many hoops that you need to be a Parkour Ninja to do successfully, and some of which I would consider to be a “Cold Butter IT Solution“, but not in this case.  The install comes in the form of an OVA and I won’t go through that process, but it’s very simple.

Once, the Appliance is installed you’ll need to go to the http://DNSNAME:5480 to start the configuration.  You’ll be reminded of this if you go to the console of the appliance as shown below.

I’m not going to go through all of the deployment screens, since they are very straight forward but the steps are outlined below.  Don’t worry, when you log into the appliance for the first time, there is a step by step wizard asking you to fill in this information, so you won’t go hunting around for all the areas you need to configure.

• Pick a deployment type.   If you’ve already deployed one manager, you can scale out your deployment right from the deployment page.  In my case we’re starting a new deployment.
• Enter Administrator Credentials and and email address for reporting alerting.
• Add a License Key
• Decide whether or not to send anonymous usage information to VMware.
• Specify a Time Server
• Configure your SMTP Server to relay emails sent from the appliance

Configuration

Once you’ve finished deploying the appliance and answering some questions, you’ll need to start listing the items you’ll be collecting logs from.  The first and most obvious would be vCenter.  When you configure vCenter, it will also try to add any hosts that vCenter is managing and all of the log forwarding will be configured for you.  Pretty slick right?

Next, you can add vCOps if you’re using it.

Next, if you wish to use Log Insight to monitor your Windows Servers, you can download an Agent which comes in the form of an MSI. Neatly packaged for deployment!

If there are other things that you’d like to monitor with Log Insight, I suggest checking out the Log Insight Management Packs from the Solution Exchange.

Log Insight Content Packs

 Log Management

Now that we’ve configured everything, just take a look at the dashboards you can create and see how it can take a variety of logs and put them into a structured table, even if some of this log data is not a structured log.

Build your own dashboards, so that you can see the information most important to you.  Maybe you’re having a performance problem with one of your machines and want to closely monitor certain events.  You can create a dashboard with just a filtered set of events, or across many hosts.

Pricing

You can purchase Log Insight 2.0 in two flavors:

• Per Operating System – $242.00
• Per Physical CPU – $$1,815

I have a hunch that if you go through sales, you might be able to get discounted pricing, but this is the list price and can be bought online without going through a sales person if you wish.

Summary

Log Insight is an amazingly easy product to install and get configured.  Not only that, it allows for quick customization of reporting to allow you to gather the metrics you want and do reporting on them, even if it’s not in a structure log format.  If you want more information, please check out the Log Insight Document Center.