VMware Aria Operations for Logs collects and analyzes all types of machine-generated log data, including application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages, performance data and system state dumps.

You can connect VMware Aria Operations for Logs to everything in your environment, including operating systems, applications, storage, firewalls, network devices for enterprise-wide visibility using log analytics.

When VMware Aria Operations for Logs is configured and ready to collect logs, there are several ways you can ingest log data including:
  • vSphere Integration — VMware Aria Operations for Logs can integrate with vSphere to automatically ingest events from a vCenter server and logs from ESXi hosts.

  • VMware Aria Operations Integration — VMware Aria Operations for Logs can integrate with VMware Aria Operations to enable various alerts to send notification events in VMware Aria Operations and e-mails to administrators.

  • Agents — VMware Aria Operations for Logs has collection agents available to send files and event logs from Linux or Windows to VMware Aria Operations for Logs

  • Syslog — VMware Aria Operations for Logs can ingest data from any source via syslog. Just set the VMware Aria Operations for Logs server as your syslog destination.
  • CFAPI — Events are sent in their original format to VMware Aria Operations for Logs using cfapi. Events sent over cfapi do not have to follow the guidelines of a syslog event and are not modified to comply with the syslog RFC.

Each event contains the following information.

Type Description
Timestamp The time when the event occurred
Source Where the event originated. This could be the originator of the syslog messages such as an ESXi host or a forwarder such as a syslog aggregation.
Text The raw text of the event.
Fields A name-value pair extracted from the event. Fields are delivered to the server as static fields only when an agent uses the CFAPI protocol.
Note: VMware Aria Operations for Logs is not responsible for the content of the log messages from other VMware products. If you have a question about the log contents, contact the product team that generated the log message.