Vmware vCenter Log Insight – Beta Release
Vmware have finally come good on their acquisition of the firm Pattern Insight and built a new tool to analyse Vmware logs and help the IT administrator to interpret unstructured data.This virtual appliance is capable of pulling in data from your Vmware hosts and also any other sources that can generate Syslog data and puts this into a nice graph format with text information so you can spot trends and issues very easily. Let’s not forget that in large Vmware installations this can equate to billions of messages a day at both the hypervisor and Vcenter level and there is finally a way of capturing this data other than using the traditional Vmware SysLog Servers and relying on this when Vmware support need data.
Listening to the founder Spiros Xanthos (Twitter handle : @spirosx) talking about the product on a recent talkshoe podcast has revealed that the licensing for this product is going to be based per source and not done on a data basis similar to other popular Log collector software out there. Currently this is going to be around $200 per source. This is a good move from Vmware and should attract a lot of large Vmware customers to look at this tool seriously.
The appliance is deployed from an OVF file and the configuration steps look very simple from documentation and videos that are currently found on the Vmware website. Once operational the interface looks like this and all sort of graphs can be derived from the metrics that are being collected.
Another neat feature is that the product ties well into any vCOPS installation also so this is not purely limited to the main Vmware vSphere implementation.
Feel free to go ahead and read more about the appliance at the following link (http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-log-insight/overview.html). The beta version of the appliance is also found on this page. Add some ESXi hosts and watch the data flow in. Don’t worry about using up the disk that is pre-configured as Vmware have said that additional VMDKs can be added at a later stage if required to capture and retain more data.
Finally, look out for a Q3 release of this software from Vmware and some sessions coming up at Vmworld 2013. I’m sure its going to be a big seller !!!