Recently I had the opportunity to attend my first vExpert briefing to discuss a new product from VMware called ‘Log Insight’. I’m sure that the brief was really great, but given some technical difficulties and bandwidth issues (yeah, Afghanistan has crap for bandwidth even on an Army base) I missed a good deal of the content being presented.
So aside from figuring out that they were saying ‘Log Insight’ and not ‘log-n-site’ I figured I’d blog a bit about what I’ve learned and provide my thoughts on the product.
Log Insight is geared to help the virtualization admin troubleshoot problems. Diagnosing problems can be a difficult and time consuming task and this is just the problem that Log Insight addresses. Not only does it make it easier to dig through logs but it also provides the ability to see trends over time. Some of the key problems addressed:
- Deal with data overload
- Get a better handle on metrics and logs generated
- Identify the true performance of virtualization infrastructure and virtualized applications
- Root cause analysis
As a graphic tool, Insight allows you to view log data from ESXi hosts, VMs, and vApps. Information is accessible in a variety of charts and graphs. Below is a screenshot of the Dashboards Overview page where you can get at-a-glance graphs of events for ESXi hosts, iSCSI and NFS, vCenter Servers and more.
Clicking on any of the graphs brings you to the ‘Interactive Analytics’ page as seen below.
The Interactive Analytics page also allows you to search for a particular key-word. The cool thing is that there is an auto-complete type feature built into the search bar so that anything indexed with what you type will list in a drop-down menu. In the above screen shot I wanted more info on iSCSI. As I started typing iSCSI I was presented with a list of objects to look at – cool stuff!
Pretty cool stuff all around! If you’re interested in trying this out check out the free beta!
For
more info checkout VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast #234