The vRealize Log Insight instance that is deployed by SDDC Manager is licensed separately. When the vRealize Log Insight instance is licensed for use in your VMware Cloud Foundation environment, you can use the capabilities of vRealize Log Insight to work with the event and log data that is collected from the various hardware devices and SDDC virtual infrastructure.
vRealize Log Insight is a log aggregator that provides simplified log viewing and analysis. The vRealize Log Insight instance collects and indexes log content for the environment's physical resources and virtual infrastructure, and provides unified querying and analysis of the log content for problem diagnosis and repair. Similarly, SDDC Manager is configured by default to send all logs to vRealize Log Insight, enabling users to browse and search logs to troubleshoot SDDC Manager failures.
You can configure the vRealize Log Insight instance for remote syslog forwarding to an instance of vRealize Log Insight that is external to the VMware Cloud Foundation system or to another syslog server. To configure vRealize Log Insight to forward events to a syslog target, see Add vRealize Log Insight Event Forwarding Destination in the vRealize Log Insight documentation.
To log in to the vRealize Log Insight Web interface from SDDC Manager UI, see Enable vRealize Log Insight in VMware Cloud Foundation.
Content Packs
The vRealize Log Insight instance includes a set of content packs. Content packs are read-only plug-ins to vRealize Log Insight that provide pre-defined knowledge about specific types of events such as log messages. The purpose of a content pack is to provide knowledge about a specific set of events in a format that is easily understandable by administrators, monitoring teams, and executives. A content pack consists of information that can be saved from either the Dashboards or Interactive Analytics pages in the vRealize Log Insight Web interface. Such information typically includes:
- Queries
- Fields
- Aggregations
- Alerts
- Dashboards
The vRealize Log Insight instance includes a number of VMware content packs, including the VMware Cloud Foundation content pack. In the vRealize Log Insight web interface, these content packs display as widgets in the page.
| Content Pack | Overview |
|---|---|
| General | This content pack includes multiple subcatergories of dashboards and analytics including overview, problems, event types, statistics, and agents. |
| VMware - NSX for vSphere | This content pack provides various dashboards and filters to give you insight into the data that is sent by the NSX for vSphere virtual infrastructure in the management and workload domains' vCenter Server instances. |
| VMware - VMware Cloud Foundation | This content pack includes an overview dashboard that gives overall summary views of the data sent by the VMware Cloud Foundation, and also provides detailed views for the various levels of interest, such as rack-level, server-level, switch-level, device-level, and so on. |
| VMware - vSAN | This content pack provides various dashboards and filters to give you insight into the logs that are sent by the management and workload domains' vSAN features. |
| VMware - vSphere | This content pack provides various dashboards and filters to give you insight into the data that is sent by the management and workload domains' vCenter Server instances. |
| VMware - vROPs | This content pack provides various dashboards and filters to give you insight into the logs that are sent by the management and workload domains' vRealize Operations features. |
To see the dashboards for one of the content packs in the vRealize Log Insight Web interface, select Dashboards and then select the specific content pack dashboard in the left hand navigation bar.
