WilliamLam.com

How to purge all logs in vRealize Log Insight?

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I had just deployed a new vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) 4.0 instance in my home lab environment to investigate a behavior that I was seeing with another product, non-vRLI related. Due to the nature of the work, I needed to have a pristine vRLI environment each time to study the results. I had already forwarded some logs into vRLI and rather than deploying another instance or re-deploy the current instance, what I really wanted to be able to do is to just wipe all the logs in vRLI but did not see an option within the UI. I also could have used VM snapshots, but was hoping there was a cleaner solution that vRLI provided out of the box.

The next place I looked immediately after was Mr. Log Insight's site aka Steve Flanders blog but there was nothing there about this other than archiving. After a few Google searches, I came across this exact same question on the vRLI Ideas site but sadly there was no solution and it was dated back in 2014. Though Steve makes a good point about just letting the logs rotate out automatically, in my case, this was not an option and I needed a pristine environment.

Being the curious one, I figured there has to be a way, even if it is not officially recommended nor supported. As you probably have guessed, I did find a way but I would caution that you read the disclaimer below before proceeding further. This was something I needed to do in my lab to test a few scenarios that was non-vRLI related, but I needed syslog target, so this is why I am using vRLI 🙂

Disclaimer: This is probably not officially supported nor recommended by VMware. Please use at your own risk. YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR LOGS

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 5

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In Part 5, we are now going to have a look at networking section of the VAMI UI.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

In the Networking tab, under the "Manage" sub-tab, you can find details about the system Hostname (PNID), DNS servers as well as the configurations for each network interface (in the case of a VCHA deployment, you would have more than one network interface configured).

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/hostname
  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/servers
  • GET /appliance/networking/interfaces
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/networking/ipv4

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


This sample script only retrieves IPv4 networking information, but you can easily retrieve IPv6 information by calling into the IPv6 VAMI API endpoints which you can refer to the documentation or the API Explorer for more details.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 4

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In Part 4, we are now going to shift our attention to a very important topic which often gets overlooked and is also usually one of the culprits for many infrastructure issues. What am I referring to? Time Synchronization! You would not believe the number of times that I hear about an issue (not always VMware-related) and after looking into it, the issue was because the user did not have proper time synchronization configured or worse, it was not even running at all. I will agree, it is not always the easiest thing to check for and sometimes there may not even be an API to use, which makes it that much more difficult. Lets see how we can verify our time settings using the new VAMI APIs.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/time
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/timesync
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/ntp

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


With this function, not only can you verify that you have NTP configured and it is up and running, but you can also easily get the current system time and compare that with the rest of your other infrastructure to ensure the VCSA/PSC is not time drifting. Historically, to be able to retrieve this information, you normally had to login via SSH and run a couple commands on the Shell and just imagine if you needed to do this across all of your vSphere environments?