Category: Log Insight

Log Insight upgrade path

Posted on Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in Log Insight

Log Insight 4.3 has just been released. I guess it is a good time to talk about upgrading and what path to follow and what is the Log Insight upgrade path. I am only gonna focus on Log Insight 3.x or newer. Basically if you are not running Log Insight 3.x or newer, you really should upgrade asap. There is now reason to wait any longer. You are just making it worse by waiting! Log Insight upgrade path Upgrading Log Insight is quite simple. Log Insight is a incremental update process. Meaning you can not skip an update. If you […]

Troubleshooting vRops Authentication problems

Posted on Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I have from time to time some issues with getting vRops authentication working correctly or applying the correct rights to the user such as they are able to do the assigned tasks. To help troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I always jump to Log Insight to get a full understanding of the issue. Well you could jump into vRops nodes and do it via linux. I just find this a lot easier, if you ask me. As Log Insight isn’t tuned to understand vRops authentication. I have had to do a little digging my self. As it turns out, and […]

Log Insight API calls Appendix

Posted on Michael Ryom4 CommentsPosted in Log Insight, Script

This is not a too lengthy blog post. It basically a copy/paste of routes file which is part of the Log Insight API. I have include both the 3.3 and 3.6 version, for comparisons. This is only meant as an educational blog post. It will give you an idea to what is possible with the Log Insight API, not just query wish, but also management wish. In order to make this work you have to follow the general guidelines for the Log Insight API and how to connect to it. As I haven’t done a Log Insight API blog post […]

esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate – Hunting for MAC

Posted on Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, Script

Log Insight is a very powerful tool to monitor your environments health status. One of my favorite dashboards to is the “General – Problems” dashboard, which is part of the  “VMware – vSphere” content pack. It comes with Log Insight per default. Because there you can get a great overview of any problems that might be in your vSphere environment. One of the problems you might see is the “esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate” or as it can be seen in the pie chart “net.vmknic.ip.duplicate”. This problem basically tells you there’s an misconfiguration in your environment. Two VMK nics have the same IP address […]

Least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices

Posted on Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I recently installed Management Pack for Storage Devices at a customer site. The customer were required to use a service account which had limited privileges in vCenter. The account had the bare minimum needed for vRops to collect data from vCenter. Using the bare minimums for collecting data wasn’t sufficient for the Management Pack for Storage Devices. Found me self needing to find the least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices. I looked at the documentation, but no answer there, so I then reached out to GSS which I later abandon as we were going no where fast. […]

Custom vRops Content Pack for Log Insight

Posted on Michael Ryom6 CommentsPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I work as a consultant. Mainly on vRops and Log Insight. This means that I have installed vRops and Log Insight quite a few times now. It also means that troubleshooting vRops is not that unfamiliar to me and what better tool to troubleshoot vRops with than VMware’s own Log Insight! In order to help me troubleshoot I have created a “content pack” for vRops. This content pack adds some more value, hence it’s not there in the current version of the vRops content pack. The content pack provides one dashboard with six widgets. The widgets are: vRops Webrequest respones […]

ESXi IOStats – vmkmgmt_keyval

Posted on Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in ESXi, Log Insight, Script, vRops

Just wanted to do a short post about vmkmgmt_keyval, as I think most admins only uses this tool for getting HBA driver/firmware versions, but you get so much more than just that. There is different forms of statistics in there, per target, per lun and block size. So first what is vmkmgmt_keyval ? vmkmgmt_keyval is an ESXi command which can be executed from ESXi’s direct console user interface (DCUI) or via SSH, in both examples you get access to ESXi Shell. The way I’m going to use vmkmgmt_keyval, is with an “-a”, after, just like in the example here: “/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmgmt_keyval/vmkmgmt_keyval […]

No Syslog Server is Configured

Posted on Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, NSX, Script, vRops

If you are running vRops and NSX, one of the mangement packs that is a must to install is the NSX management pack – On a side note remember to link Log Insight to vRops, that way when you install the NSX management pack in vRops, it will also install the NSX content pack in Log Insight and setup the alerts in the NSX content pack and forward them to vRops. The NSX management pack delivers both NSX network information as well as traditional network information from switches via SNMP and CDP/LLDP. It helps to provide better to understand of […]

Log Insight + Netflow = Awesome part 2

Posted on Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in Log Insight, Script

In my first blog post Log Insight + Netflow = Awesome I show cased that Log Insight could be used to ingest netflows and showed some graphics and talked about possible extensions the data found into other products such as vRealize Operations or NSX. I got some comments from people who wanted to learn more, but instead of me keep answering the same questions, I have posted what and how on to github. This marks the first github project that I have created. So even though this is not even half baked, not thought through and very much just for […]

Log Insight + Netflow = Awesome

Posted on Michael Ryom10 CommentsPosted in Log Insight

This is just another awesome use case for Log Insight. I have setup the vSphere Distributed switch to send netflow to a netflow proxy which then sends them as syslog messages to Log Insight. The reason for this is that Log Insight can’t ingest netflow messages natively. What you then end up with is a lot of logged netflow messages like the one below. Ignore the extracted field names, these can be designed as you wish. I went with speed 🙂 You might think what can this be used for and why should I care ? Log Insight + Netflow […]