vCenter Log Insight

A preview of native syslog support in VCSA 6.0

03.30.2015 by William Lam // 29 Comments

Proper logging of VMware hosts, services and application logs are becoming more and more critical these days and their usage goes beyond just troubleshooting. In many of our customer environments, extended log retention is often mandatory to satisfy auditing and compliance requirements. Support for remote syslog has been around in ESXi for quite some time and has included several enhancements over the years, however logging for vCenter Server itself has not changed much over the years. Historically, vCenter Server started out as a Windows application and outside of standard filesystem logging there is also Microsoft Event Logs which was not really all that useful. With the release of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), syslog support became more attainable, at least without additional 3rd party tools.

I can even remember when I was an administrator, I had to get creative on how to forward vCenter Server logs to a remote syslog server which I had blogged about back in 2012. Though the solution works, it was not ideal especially when you are running several dozen to several hundred vCenter Server instances like many of our customers do today. When I had discovered that there was a Common Logging initiative within VMware for vSphere 6.0, I was pretty excited and I can only guess that this also put a big smile on many of our GSS folks faces 😉

As you can imagine this was no small undertaking, especially with the organic growth of services and applications within vCenter Server. The goal was not only to support native remote syslog but to also standardize on the location, rotation, retention of all the logs and most importantly providing a consistent time stamp of events so that an administrator or 3rd party tool can easily correlate operations across multiple VMware log files. Though complete native syslog support in vCenter Server is not 100% ready just yet, much of the plumbing and foundation has already been finished and in fact you can see some of this in the latest release VCSA 6.0.

With VCSA 6.0, there is partial support for native remote syslog which is configurable through the VMware Syslog Service under the new vCenter Server System Configuration found within the vSphere Web Client.

There are four settings that you will need to configure:

Common Log Level - * (everything), info, notice, warn, error, crit, alert & emerg
Host - Hostname/IP Address of a *single* remote syslog server
Port - Port of the remote syslog server (514 for UDP & 1514 for TCP is already opened on the VCSA firewall)
Protocol - Supports tcp, udp & tls

A restart is not required when configuring the syslog service and logs will automatically be forwarded to the remote syslog server which is quite nice. You can also view the health status of the syslog service and its connectivity to the remote syslog server by clicking onto the "Summary" view as seen in the screenshot below. For more information about the new syslog service, check out the official documentation here.

So what exactly does partial syslog support really mean? What logs are being forwarded to a syslog server when the syslog service is enabled?

There are currently two major sets of logs that are forwarded to a remote syslog server when the new syslog service is configured:

All logs from ESXi hosts that are connected to the vCenter Server will be forwarded
A partial set of vCenter Server services (details in table below) will be forwarded

Service Name	Service Description	Service Log Location
applmgmt-audit	Appliance Management	/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/applmgmt-audit/applmgmt-audit-syslog.log
audispd	Audit Event Dispatcher	/var/log/audit/audispd/audispd-syslog.log
auditd	Audit System	/var/log/audit/auditd/auditd-syslog.log
rbd	Auto Deploy	/var/log/vmware/rbd/rbd-syslog.log
vmafdd	VMware Authentication Framework	/var/log/vmware/vmafdd/vmafdd-syslog.log
vmcad	VMware Certificate Service	/var/log/vmware/vmcad/vmcad-syslog.log
vmdird	VMware Directory Service	/var/log/vmware/vmdird/vmdird-syslog.log
watchdog-rhttpproxy	Watchdog for Reverse HTTP Proxy service	/var/log/vmware/rhttpproxy/watchdog-rhttpproxy/watchdog-rhttpproxy-syslog.log
watchdog-syslog	Watchdog for Syslog service	/var/log/vmware/syslog/watchdog-syslog/watchdog-syslog-syslog.log
watchdog-vmware-vpostgres	Watchdog for vPostgres DB service	/var/log/vmware/vpostgres/watchdog-vmware-vpostgres/watchdog-vmware-vpostgres-syslog.log
watchdog-vpxd	Watchdog for vCenter Server service	/var/log/vmware/vpxd/watchdog-vpxd/watchdog-vpxd-syslog.log
watchdog-vws	Watchdog for vCenter Web Services service	/var/log/vmware/vws/watchdog-vws/watchdog-vws-syslog.log

Note: The information above was extracted from /etc/vmware-syslog/custom-file-location.conf

Here is a screenshot of my vRealize Log Insight instance ingesting the logs that have been forwarded over from my VCSA 6.0:

Although not all the vCenter Server services have been integrated into this new native syslog mechanism, you can see where things headed and hopefully in the not too distant future we will have full native syslog support for all application and system logs found withint vCenter Server. One thing that I really do like is that I can go to one single location to configure my remote syslog server and automatically receive all logs from the ESXi hosts being managed by that vCenter Server and forwarded to the configured syslog server. This definitely makes it operationally friendly so that you have one less thing to configure when provisioning new ESXi hosts.

One limitation that I found when configuring your remove syslog server is that there is no way to reset the values to NULL and the UI also limits the number of remote syslog server to just one, even though you can specify multiple targets. One way to get around this UI limitation is by editing the underlying configuration file which is located in /etc/vmware-syslog/syslog.conf

Here is an example of what the syslog.conf looks like for the above configuration:

*.info @log.primp-industries.com:514;RSYSLOG_SyslogProtocol23Format

If you wish to add a second or even third syslog server, you simply just need to duplicate the existing line and update the hostname or IP Address of your syslog server.

*.info @log.primp-industries.com:514;RSYSLOG_SyslogProtocol23Format
*.info @log2.primp-industries.com:514;RSYSLOG_SyslogProtocol23Format

If you are manually editing the syslog.conf, you will need to restart the syslog service by running the following command for the changes to take effect:

/etc/init.d/vmware-syslog restart

Some of you might say this is great and all, but one of the most important log files which is the vCenter Server log (vpxd.log) is not being being forwarded. How useful is this really to me? I know I definitely asked that question 🙂 Though not ideal, there is a small configuration change you can apply to easily get vpxd.log to also forward to a remote syslog server using the new syslog service.

You will need to change the vCenter Server advanced setting "config.log.outputToSyslog" property (can also be done using vSphere API) from false to true as seen in the screenshot below.

The above assumes you have already configured the syslog service and for this change to go into effect, you will need to restart the vCenter Server service. This can be done using the System Configuration and under the vCenter Server Service, by just right clicking and selecting "Restart".

If we now look at our vRealize Log Insight instance or whatever syslog server you are using, you should now see entries from the vpx.log being forwarded:

You can also perform this change from the command-line by editing the vCenter Server configuration file at /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg and modifying <outputToSyslog>true</outputToSyslog>

Once you have saved the changes, you will need to restart the vCenter Server by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vmware-vpxd restart

For those of you who are considering vSphere 6.0 and using the VCSA, this is something I definitely recommend checking out to help simplify the management of both your logs for vCenter Server and your ESXi hosts. I know the VMware Engineering team is working hard on making native syslog support even easier in the future and I look forward to the complete solution hopefully in the near future.

How to customize the login UI for vRealize {Operations Manager, Log Insight, Automation}?

03.09.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

With so much excitement and positive feedback (internal/external) regarding my article on customizing the login UI for the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client, I knew it was only a matter of time before folks started asking about customizing other VMware login UIs. As I have mentioned already, going beyond just the aesthetics such as adding an organizations logo or colors, it is often a mandatory requirement for many organizations to display a security or warning banner to users prior to logging in. I was recently added into an internal Socialcast thread asking whether it would be possible to do the same for vRealize Operations Manager (vROps).

I figure I take a quick look to see if this was possible and what it might take. I wanted to also take this opportunity and share a few other solutions that other VMware folks have found in terms of customizing the login UIs for both vRealize Log Insight (thanks GSS Engineer Alan Castonguay for sharing the details) and vRealize Automation (thanks to Justin Jones for his awesome tool). You can find all the details below as well as some additional tidbits through my exploration.

Something that can be helpful in the future as more products integrate with vCenter's SSO (PSC in vSphere 6.0) is that you only need to customize the login page once and it will be available to all other solutions.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

vROps (vRealize Operations Manager)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vROps 6.0. The first is the login.jsp file that controls the login UI. If you wish to simply replace the entire image, it will require some tweaking as the login UI is actually composed of several graphical elements making this task a bit more difficult. The second is the images directory which you will want to upload any content you wish to use for the login UI.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/pages/login.jsp
/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/images

Due to the various tweaks, I have created a sample login.jsp which you can download and reference here. This will allow you to replace the entire background for the vROps login UI as well as adding in some text that you wish to display. I know how big of a fan Rawlinson Rivera is of Justin Bieber, so I thought I use his favorite background for creating what an a custom vROps login UI can potentially look like.

vRLI (vRealize Log Insight)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vRLI 2.5. The first is the main login background image which is a 600x410 image if you wish to stick with the default layout. The second is a 300x78 transparent image for the vRLI logo, you can either keep this or replace it with your own.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

/usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/misc/login-bg.png
/usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/logo/vmware-logo-big-white-v2.png

If you wish to add additional text to the login page, you can edit the following file which controls the login UI.

/usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/loginsight/login/login.css

Here is a quick example by inserting the following above Line 20:

<div style="color:#ffffff;text-align:center;font-size:20px">Punching Cloud Edition</div>

Here is an example of what custom login UI for vRLI could potentially look like:

vRA (vRealize Automation)

As a bonus, if you are interested in customizing the Login UI for vRA, be sure to check out fellow Automation colleague Justin Jones who has built this really cool utility called vRA Brand Customizer to help with customizing vRA login UI for the various tenants in your environment. I would recommend keeping an eye on this tool for some really cool stuff coming in the future 😉

Automating Log Insight 2.0 configurations

04.21.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Last week I had a chance to deploy the latest release of vCenter Log Insight 2.0 (currently in public beta) in my lab to give it a spin. I must say, I am very impressed with the slick new UI and some of the new capabilities like the scale-out and high availability feature.

The actual deployment of the Virtual Appliance is pretty straight forward and the only thing I would mention when selecting the OVF Deployment Size is that the default "Small" option is not the smallest configuration possible. There is actually an "Extra Small" option that can be selected in the drop-down menu which is targeted for POCs and lab evaluations. This will help with minimizing the resource constraints for lab environments.

Something that I am always interested in when evaluating a new solution is to see how easy an automated and unattended configuration is. With the help of some of the Log Insight folks, I was able to create the following shell script which will perform a basic configuration of Log Insight which includes the backend database, admin password and NTP servers:

#!/bin/bash
# William Lam
# www.virtuallyghetto.com

LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD=vmware123
LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD=vmware123
NTP_SERVERS="0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org"

### DO NOT EDIT BEYOND HERE ###

LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR=/storage/core/loginsight/config
NODE_TOKEN_FILE=node-token
LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_FILE=loginsight-config.xml#1
NODE_UUID=$(uuidgen)

echo "Creating ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR} .."
[ ! -e ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR} ] && mkdir -p ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}

echo "Generating Log Insight Node UUID ..."
echo ${NODE_UUID} > ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}/${NODE_TOKEN_FILE}

echo "Generating Log Insight Configuration file ..."
cat > ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}/${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_FILE} << __LOG_INSIGHT__
<config>
<version>
<strata-version value="2.0.1-1734312.UNSTABLE" release-name="Nightly"/>
</version>
<distributed overwrite-children="true">
<daemon port="16520" token="${NODE_UUID}">
<service-group name="standalone"/>
</daemon>
</distributed>
<database>
<password value="${LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD}"/>
<port value="12543"/>
</database>
<ntp>
<ntp-servers value="${NTP_SERVERS}"/>
</ntp>
</config>
__LOG_INSIGHT__

echo "Restarting Log Insight ..."
service loginsight restart

echo "Setting Admin password ..."
ADMINPASSWORD=${LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD} /opt/vmware/bin/li-reset-admin-passwd.sh

You will need to edit the following variables within the script:

LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD
LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD
NTP_SERVERS

Here is an example of running the script against a newly deployed Log Insight system:

The above is just an example of what could be automated for Log Insight. If you take a look at the Configuration section of Log Insight, there are many more options.

If you decide you want to automate additional configurations. The way you would accomplish this is to first configure everything from the Log Insight configuration UI. Once you are happy with the configuration, SSH into your Log Insight system. In /storage/core/loginsight/config you will find a couple of configuration files loginsight-config.xml#X with a numeric number at the end. If you take a look at the file with the highest number, it will contain the latest changes to Log Insight and the configurations you made using the UI. You can then take that file and update the script to automate the other configuration options.