VMware vCenter Log Insight- Puppet Enterprise Content Pack Available

The Puppet Enterprise Content Pack is now available for VMware vCenter Log Insight. If you’re not familiar with VMware vCenter Log Insight then I highly recommend you take a look and download the free trial as it is highly useful piece of software that performs log aggregation and analysis across various devices and components in your infrastructure, for example; storage.  Any of you that are, or have been, an IT administrator or IT manager will know the frustrations in trying to be track down and troubleshoot performance or general errors across multiple systems, hardware or virtual based devices.  This can be a particularly time consuming process with you having to find and consolidate all the different log files, which almost always have to be accessed via different means and interfaces.  In smaller IT environments this can be less of a problem though in medium sized infrastructures this can be a real nightmare in my experience.

By having log files within your IT environment automatically consolidated down to a single location, from where you can look for trends, review, and perform intelligent type searches this can not only reduce the amount of time it takes you to troubleshoot an issue but also means that you can be more proactive in monitoring the overall health of your environment.

Obviously the format of log files take different forms, as it’d be far too easy if there was a standard format that the industry adhered to , so for the VMware vCenter Log Insight software to make sense of the log files it is receiving there needs to be a way of providing a means to decode/translate the log files into a standard type format – this is the role the Log Insight Content Packs perform.

There are Content Packs available from a wide range of VMware Partners such as Cisco, EMC, HyTrust, NetApp and VCE, along with Content Packs for VMware products such as Horizon.   Content Packs can be downloaded from the VMware Solution Exchange Marketplace.  I’d expect to see additional Content Packs adding over time which will provide an even more compelling reason to give VMware vCenter Log Insight a look.