vCenter Log Insight is a product that helps automate management of large numbers of systems. There was a time when administrators were responsible for 10-20 servers, but this has been increasing steadily over the years. However the proliferation of VMs has caused the an explosion in number of servers to be managed.
In addition, SLAs upon IT are getting more stringent. As a result IT staff are under pressure to meet SLAs when there is a failure. Complicating this process is the fact that each system generates a huge amount of log information. Identifying the root cause in such a situation is challenging for IT. Log Insight automates this part of the process.
This product completely integrates with vCenter, and indexes log information received from both physical and virtual servers. Common search terms are used as keywords for indexing, as an aid to easy troubleshooting. Use of this product requires planning for storage sizing for the logs.
Users can construct reports based upon filtering criteria that capture the nature of the issue, the periodicity, and other associated information to isolate the information that is needed. These reports can also include dashboards and extracted fields that are relevant to the problem at hand. In this manner, millions of records can be narrowed down to tens or hundreds of records, improving IT response and enabling compliance with SLAs.
I was able to reduce the number of records to a handful when I conducted my own report. This helped me to quickly understand the underlying behavior and isolate the issue.