Cloud Content Pack (vCD) for Log Insight

For those of you out there who use VMware vCloud Director and Log Insight you may be interested in a content pack that we have built for use by the OneCloud team to help make our cloud run smoother and to give us a ton of (wait for it) Insight into our environment. It's been a work in progress for about 9 months off and on but has served us very well. I hope that it serves you just as well.

Here are some screenshots:

 

I hope that this content pack is able to help you better manage your VMware vCloud Director environment. You can download the Content Pack here just be aware that this is not released by VMware and is not supported by them. Like everything else on my blog it just came from a random blogger on the internet :)

 

 

 

Monitoring VMware vCenter Servers using HTTP Health checks

If you are curious about monitoring your VMware vCenter Servers which I am sure that most of you are then you might find this interesting. Did you know that you can monitor the:

1. VMware vSphere Profile-driven Storage Service
2. vCenter Inventory Service
3. ESX Agent Manager
4. vService Manager
5. vCenter Storage Monitoring Service
6. vCenter Logging Services
7. Autodeploy Service

All with a simple, unauthenticated HTTP GET request? Here’s how:

Inside of /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/extensions/ you will find several sub folders, one for each extension and inside of those an extension.xml file. That file contains the URL for the healthcheck for each service.

If you do a GET request against the URL listed it will return a bit of XML that includes the status of the service that you are inquiring about.

For quick reference here are the ones currently available in 5.x

https://<FQDN>/sps/health.xml - Storage Profile Service
https://<FQDN>/sms/health.xml - vCenter Storage Monitoring Service
http://<FQDN>/eam/eamService-web/health.xml - ESX Agent Manager
https://<FQDN>vsm/health.xml - vService Manager
https://<FQDN>:8443/ls/health - vCenter Logging Services
https://<FQDN>:6502/vmw/rbd/health-info - Autodeploy Service

The inventory Service works out of box on a Windows vCenter but on the vCSA you will need to open port 10080 on the iptables firewall first, preferably only to your monitoring host.

http://<FQDN>:10080/health - vCenter Inventory Service

and here is the needed firewall update:

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp –s <SOURCE IP> --dport 10080 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save

Technorati Tags: VMware,vSphere,vCenter,vCSA,HTTP,Monitoring,Health Check,XML,GET,Service,iptables

Automatically Configure VMware Log Insight

One of the things that I recently needed to do was be able to script the configuration of Log Insight so that an admin no longer needed to go through the web UI to do the initial installation. The below script works but has a limitation: You need to know what your AD password hash and and the admin password hash and salt are. The way that I did this is by using the values from my original Log Insight server. You can be more clever if you are so inclined.

The script is designed to use the lower level Linux commands which can obviously be replaced with simple file copies but for what it’s worth here you go.

   1: #Change the default NTP Servers

   2: sed -i 's/server 0.us.pool.ntp.org/time.domain.com/' /etc/ntp.conf

   3: sed -i 's/server 1.us.pool.ntp.org/time1.domain.com/' /etc/ntp.conf

   4: sed -i 's/server 2.us.pool.ntp.org//' /etc/ntp.conf

   5: sed -i 's/server 3.us.pool.ntp.org//' /etc/ntp.conf

   7: cp /etc/ntp.conf /etc/ntp.target.conf

   8: chkconfig ntp --level 35 on

   9: service ntp restart

  10: #License LI

  11: echo "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX" >> /usr/lib/loginsight/application/etc/license/loginsight_license.txt

  12: #Configure LI. I wanted this as low level as possible, nothing stops you from just copying the file instead of creating it line by line.

  13: mkdir /storage/core/loginsight/config

  14: echo "<config>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  15: echo "     <version>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  16: echo "         <strata-version value=\"1.5.0-1435442\" release-name=\"1.5 GA\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  17: echo "     </version>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  18: echo "     <alerts>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  19: echo "         <admin-alert-receivers value=\"alert-notify-email@domain.com\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  20: echo "     </alerts>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  21: echo "     <ntp>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  22: echo "         <ntp-servers value=\"time.domain.com, time1.domain.com\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  23: echo "     </ntp>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  24: echo "     <authentication>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  25: echo "         <auth-method value=\"active-directory\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  26: echo "         <ad-domain value=\"domain.com\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  27: echo "         <ad-username value=\"username\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  28: echo "         <ad-password value=\"XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  29: echo "     </authentication>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  30: echo "     <smtp>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  31: echo "         <server value=\"smtp.domain.com\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  32: echo "         <default-sender value=\"log-insight-server1@domain.com\" />" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  33: echo "     </smtp>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  34: echo "</config>" >> /storage/core/loginsight/config/loginsight-config.xml#9

  35: #Add Content Packs

  36: mkdir /usr/lib/loginsight/application/etc/content-packs/vCD

  37: #copy Content Pack contents to /usr/lib/loginsight/application/etc/content-packs/vCD/content.json

  38: #Update the admin email address and password

  39: /usr/lib/loginsight/application/lib/pgsql/bin/psql logdb -p 12543 -U liuser -c "UPDATE li_user SET email = 'admin-email@domain.com', password = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX', salt = 'XXXXXXXX' WHERE name = 'admin';"

  40: #First start

  41: service loginsight restart

  42: #Add AD group to be a LI admin group.

  43: /usr/lib/loginsight/application/lib/pgsql/bin/psql logdb -p 12543 -U liuser -c "INSERT INTO li_group (group_id, domain, name, role_id) VALUES (5, 'domain.com','log_insight_admins',1);"

Now you are ready to login using either your new admin password or via your Active Directory account.

 

Technorati Tags: Log Insight,VMware,script,automation,automate,configure