vCenter Log Insight is GA and available for downloads. This new product has been announced about 3 weeks ago and I had reported in details about the new clustered architecture in my post here – VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0 – faster with machine learning capabilities.
Update: Check the vCenter Log Insight 2.5 detailed post (vRealize Log Insight).
The product is faster (up to 6 times, with up to 80% faster log analysis time), with better charts and offers large scale deployments and clustering where DR scenarios are supported. One node fails, other nodes continues to function with the admin don't have interruptions in logs flow(this would need some loadbalancer in front).
Also the possibility to get logs from Windows based systems through a small agent (MSI package weights 3 Megs only) is very interesting. The server based agent config can configure all agents in mass. Worth to mention that the agent has no dependencies like .NET or so…
The native Windows agent (runs as Windows service) has low memory and CPU footprint and collects events from standard or custom Windows event channels, but also collects logs from flat files and directories. For Windows based vCenter servers which stores logs in directories and files (not in Windows events) this can be a very useful solution of collecting logs.
New HTML 5 web interface:
Principal features of the Clustering and Scale Out
- Single UI and Management Interface
- Up to 2Tb of live searchable data per node
- High availability – needs external load balancer to tolerate node failures when in scale out mode. If one of the nodes goes down, then the current traffic can be redirected to existing nodes. Any product supporting syslog protocol with TCP or UDP. (NSX, vCNS, HI5, Riverbed, HA proxy, Internext…)
What's New in vCenter Log Insight 2.0?
- Improved Query Performance ( up to 6x faster processing) and 8x faster than the version 1.5 of Log Insight.
- Windows VMs – a very lightweight Windows agent which collects events from servers and desktops
- Predictive Analytics/Machine Learning – for faster problem resolution
- Tighter Integration with vCAC, NSX and Horizon View
- Integration with vCOPs Suite
- Extensibility with Content Packs – Log insight marketplace, extensibility
- Brocade SAN Content Pack – monitoros syslog events from Brocade FC switches, generates alerts
New General Dashboard
The product comes up with two content pack where there is one for vSphere. This content pack has the basics overviews of your environment, then other menus can get some deeper insights in:
- General – Overview
- General – Inventory
- General – Security
- vCenter – Alarms
- vCenter – Tasks
- ESXi
- DRS
- HA
- Networking
- Storage – Overview
- Storage – SCSI latency/errors
- Storage SCSI Sense Codes
- Storage – NFS
- Virtual Machine
Licensing Changes
Licensing is newly announced based on (CPU socket licensing), which means that per physical CPU (per ESXi). Previously there has been only OS image licensing. The US based pricing per CPU is announced for $1500 per CPU socket.
Product page and trials – vCenter Log Insight
