The overhead of running vRops

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in vRops

Have a customer which did insourceing from a large three letter provider. This is in part the story of the benefit to their environment after uninstalling all the three lettered vendor’s software and the other part is to in-lighten you about the load that vRops puts on your environment. The overhead of running vRops – is small! Lets find out what is really the cost of running vRops in your vSphere environment! We know how much CPU, Memory, IOPS etc. vRops requires. You have sized your environment, so there should but no doubt about the cost of having vRops running. […]

ESXi IOStats – vmkmgmt_keyval

Posted 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 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 […]

vRops Symptoms & Alerts – Disk usage

Posted Michael Ryom4 CommentsPosted in vRops

Doesn’t seem like everybody really understands how good and how big a change vRops symptoms and alerts have gone through since version 5.x. vRops 6.x has an whole new way of informing about the status of an object which is called a symptom and on the alert side, symptoms are used to give the alert the correct properties to ensure that the alert carries the weight it ought to have. This way we can eliminate false positives, which is never wanted when doing monitoring. When that is said, vRops is only a monitoring tool. It doesn’t know how you would […]

Log Insight + Netflow = Awesome part 2

Posted 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 […]

vRops API – Working with Alerts

Posted Michael Ryom2 CommentsPosted in Script, vRops

This is another example and use case for using the vRops API to make some tasks easier. Let me set the scene. You have a large environment with maybe a 1000 datastores.  Quite a few alerts in vRops for datastores that are full or about to run full. Like the pro you are, you have of course datastore clusters in use. Like so many others the storage team uses an automated storage tiering, which forces us to disable some SDRS stuff. For many that means that SDRS is a manual task which can be run in order to distribute the […]

Log Insight + Netflow = Awesome

Posted 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 […]

Getting the Log Insight agent

Posted Michael Ryom2 CommentsPosted in Log Insight

This is just a short post on how to get access to the Log Insight agent. I recently found out that there is a neat way of getting the agent directly from the Log Insight server. Instead of downloading from the Log Insight server and then uploading the agent to a new device. Now you can simply download it directly. These are the urls you need dependent on which type of package you need. RPM: https://LogInsight/api/v1/agent/packages/types/rpm DEB: https://LogInsight/api/v1/agent/packages/types/deb BIN: https://LogInsight/api/v1/agent/packages/types/bin MSI: https://LogInsight/api/v1/agent/packages/types/msi   Using Linux and curl to download the agent with, the command would look like this: curl -o […]

Log Insight 3.3 Licensing

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in Log Insight

Log Insight 3.3 has been released, if you haven’t seen all the new and awesome stuff in there, go check it out the release notes here and the what’s new blog post over at blogs.vmware.com here. With this new release new ways to license Log Insight is also coming. For all vCenter customers, the vCenter license now includes a 25 OSI pack for Log Insight, with some limitations, I will get to that later. Another cool thing is that all vCloud Suite customers get Log Insight for free as in, you get CPU licenses for the amount of CPUs that […]

vRops links to useful blogs

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

There’s a lot of good bloggers out there and a great momentum for vRops topics lately. So I thought I would share some of the blogs that I follow and find useful. This is just a link collection, that I will try to keep up to date. Have I forgot some one, drop me a message below, thanks. blogs.vmware.com Definit Elastic sky labs I’m all virtual mY tECh Bl09 Scamallach Solutionexchange that virtual boy thecloudxpert.net vbulosity Virtualise me Virtual Red Dot VM Ignite vRealize.it VROPerational vXpress   Lastly, this blogger has also done a few vRops releated blog posts MichaelRyom.dk […]