Before we get started with this post it’s important to highlight the product versions being used here.  Namely, version 6.7 of vRealize Operations and version 4.6.1 of vRealize Log Insight.  VMworld 2018 is currently underway and new product versions will shortly released towards the end of 2018.  This may or may not change the procedures shown in this post.

The integration between these 2 products is a 2-way integration.  That is, both products must be integrated to work with the other and each integration gives you different functionality.

Adding vRLI to vROPs

This first part of the integration gives you the ability to access to the vRLI product from within the vROPs interface.  In vROPs 6.7, the vRLI interface is presented on the “Home” screen under “Troubleshooting > Using Logs” and gives you the ability to use the product without switching to a different web page/tab.

To perform this first stage integration the “VMware vRealize Log Insight” solution adapter needs to be configured.  No credentials are required however you can select the collector or collector group that you wish to use manage the integration.

The adapter should be shown in a “Data Receiving” state as shown below.

Adding vROPs to vRLI

The reverse configuration enables detailed logging information to be displayed inside the vROPs interface for specific objects on the “Logs” tab.  This integration leverages auto populated filters to show the user only logging data for the object selected.

Here we can see a virtual machine has been selected in the “Environment” tab.  The “Logs” tab for the VM is empty because we have not performed the vRLI to vROPs integration yet.

This integration is completed by switching to the vRLI interface (either using the integration we have just configured in this article or be loading the vRLI interface directly).

Once logged in, switch to the “Administration” screen using the menu in the top right corner of the interface.

The “Integration” section offers specific production integration to be completed.  In this case we will configure vROPs.

In this example we are configuring the integration to point to our master vROPs node (this environment only has a single node) and the vRLI target is the integrated load balancer FQDN.

Our log tab within vROPs now shows some signs of configuration with the auto-populated filter in place for the vm object selected.  However, there are no events or event data being shown as would be expected.  This is because we still need our workload to send logging data to vRLI for analysis which is done by means of deploying and configuring an in-guest agent (we will cover this in a future post).

Lets look at another object to get an idea of what we should be seeing for something that has been configured.  In this example we are using the VCSA from a vSphere 6.5 deployment.  Our only configuration has been to populate the vSphere Integration section within the vRLI interface.

Now we see events that relate to the VCSA in question.  Again, the filter that has been auto created is specific for our VCSA, excluding data from all other objects.