Logging

In my previous post I walked through configuring kubernetes ingress with automatically generated SSL certificates and DNS registration using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid’s Packages. Another of the packaged applications available is Fluent-bit, which enables log forwarding from your Kubernetes cluster and workloads to a range of supported logging endpoints.

There are a couple of tweaks required in order to forward logs to vRealize Automation Log Insight Cloud. We need to use the HTTP output in the Fluent Bit configuration to forward the logs as a JSON payload to the Log Insight API. We also need to append an authentication header with an API key, and configure some tags so that the Tanzu Kubnernetes Grid Content Pack will pick up the logs.

In this humble consultant’s opinion, Log Insight is one of the most useful tools in the administrator’s tool belt for troubleshooting vRealize Automation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to help troubleshoot an issue that, when asked, people don’t know which log they should be looking at. The simple fact is that vRealize Automation has a lot of log files. Correlating these log sources to provide an overall picture is a painful, manual process - unless you have Log Insight!

With the release of vCenter Log Insight Public Beta ( http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/vcenter-log-insight ) I thought I’d strike while the iron is hot and run through the installation and configuration.

Deploying the OVF

This is such a bread and butter task that it doesn’t require more than a few words – it’s definitely worth looking at the Sizing PDF before you deploy ( VMware-vCenter-Log-Insight-1.0-Beta-Virtual-Appliance-Sizing.pdf ) as it’s not small even for a test installation. If you’re using less than the recommended 8GB RAM there are additional steps to change the heap size for performance.