VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has introduced VMware vCenter Log Insight, a new automated log management and analytics product for the cloud era.
By extending analytics to logs, VMware enables IT organisations to gain real-time insights from vast amounts of log data generated by applications, physical hardware and virtualised infrastructure, helping to minimise troubleshooting times as well as improve operational efficiency and reduce IT costs.
“Dynamic virtual and cloud environments generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, requiring analytics for real-time intelligence and visibility across IT infrastructure and applications,” says Chris Norton, senior regional director southern Africa, VMware.
“With VMware vCenter Log Insight, we’re extending our analytics-based approach to provide timely and rich insight of machine-generated data to IT administrators and operations teams.
“By integrating VMware vCenter Log Insight with the industry-leading VMware vCenter Operations, we are enabling our customers to take advantage of our unique solution that simplifies troubleshooting in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.”
Machine-generated log data contains valuable operational and diagnostics details regarding IT infrastructure that can be applied to identify and troubleshoot IT problems. With the high volume of log data and the dynamic nature of data structures, IT organisations of today are challenged with managing and mining logs for operational insights in realtime.
Purpose-built for log analytics, VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers automated log management through log aggregation, analytics and search for system monitoring, troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
The product consumes unstructured log data from a wide range of IT infrastructure components including applications, firewalls, network devices, operating systems, storage, virtual machines and hosts, and more, to provide enterprise-wide visibility.
VMware vCenter Log Insight supports streaming data and real-time queries, and features a just-in-time schema definition that adapts to any data format. Additionally, VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers the performance and scalability required by IT organisations for visualising and analysing multi-terabyte datasets.
Organisations seeking a log analytics solution optimised for VMware environments can utilise VMware vCenter Log Insight, which features built-in knowledge and native support for VMware vSphere, including pre-built dashboards and reports based on best practices from VMware engineering and global support.
Integration between VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware vCenter Operations further enables organisations to bring together and analyse both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management.
Directly from VMware vCenter Operations, administrators can launch VMware vCenter Log Insight in context for any object or alert to identify the root cause of an IT infrastructure issue. VMware vCenter Log Insight also converts log data into KPIs that are fed directly to VMware vCenter Operations for administrators to view log details and alerts in a single dashboard.
VMware vCenter Log Insight was developed to make it easy for customers to deploy, use and consume. Delivered as a virtual appliance, VMware vCenter Log Insight can be deployed within minutes, offering IT organisations fast time-to-value.
Once running, administrators use an intuitive graphical user interface featuring a search and query box, as well as pre-configured dashboards and reports to gain real-time insights from log data. VMware vCenter Log Insight is priced per operating system instance, such as physical server, virtual machine or virtualised host, rather than by log data volume. This offers customers a simple, predictable pricing model.
“VMware vCenter Log Insight is surprisingly easy to setup. It just worked after deploying the virtual appliance and setting the IP,” says Brandon Gordon, IT architect II, CSX.
“The ease of extracting data, combined with the data visualisation makes VMware vCenter Log Insight deceptively simple and extremely powerful to use.”