Recently, I wanted to start a belated upgrade of an Aria Operations for Log cluster with the help of tool VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle. The first step is running an inventory. Within seconds, error LCMVRLICONF40004 was presented. Fig. 1 The “invalid hostname” message was not very helpful, the “show more” section provided the following information: com.vmware.vrealize.lcm.vrli. Exception: Cannot execute ssh commands. Exception encountered : Session.connect: java.security.spec. at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm. at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm. at java.base/java.util. at java.base/java.util. at java.base/ja ..read more

VMware recently published VMware Aria Operations for Logs version 8.14 (8.14 Build 22564181, released on 19-10-2023). Like most updates, this one comes with functional improvements and security enhancements. In my opinion, the main reason to install this version is because it fixes a serious vulnerability (CVSS score 8.1), present in the previous versions since 8.6. See this bulletin for more information. For a complete overview of the enhancements, see the 8.14 release notes. The most prominent are: The product now supports the external NSX Advanced Load Balancer, providing more load-balanci ..read more

It looks like VMware Aria Operations for Logs (previously Log Insight) contains a bug in the Access Control part. I will explain; Access is granted by assigning a role to users or groups. A role is a group of permissions that ultimately determines what a user is allowed to do. For more information about the Roles and permissions in Aria Operations for logs, read my post.Fig. 1 – Four predefined Roles Aria Operations for Logs comes out of the box with four predefined roles. Apart from the Super Admin role, the other roles can be edited and therein lies the problem. As an example we edited the V ..read more

A brief description, recently I ran into a issue when working with an Aria Operations for Logs cluster configured to use Workspace One Access enabled for Active Directory support as an authentication source. Logging in via the GUI was not the problem, I was updating scripts as described in this post to work with Workspace One Access. While working with the Aria Operations for Logs API, the first step is to authenticate. Authentication requires 3 parameters: username, password and provider. The username and password do not require further explanation, although, one should also pay attention to ..read more

Recently VMware released vRealize Log Insight, correction “VMware Aria Operations for Logs” version  8.12. The new name for this product had been going around for some time, but this is the first version to be released as “VMware Aria Operations for Logs” as you can see after booting the product.Fig. 1 Although things are still not always going well with the new naming as you can see below.Fig. 2 Apart from the branding, what else comes with the 8.12 version? The full overview can be found in the release-notes can be found here. What is new in this version? An overview of the most interes ..read more

Intro Recently, I was involved in some Log Insight incidents. To successfully resolve them, an action in Log Insight’s Cassandra database was required. Besides application logic, Cassandra, the distributed NoSQL database, is an important component of Log Insight. So, time for a closer look at Cassandra in Log Insight. Warning: Be careful, after a login into the database; never execute commands without knowing the impact. Certain commands can render Log insight unusable! Access For this article, I am using Log Insight version 8.10. VMware has published KB 57901 “How to Access the Cassandra Data ..read more

It is that time of year, I did not use the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (from now on: vRLCM. New name is “VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle”) for quite some time. So to be able to upgrade Log Insight with vRLCM to the latest version, the first step is to upgrade the vRLCM by performing a System Upgrade. Second step is installing the latest Product Support Pack for vRLCM. If that is all done, you are good to start upgrading the products. After the upgrade, vRLCM reported that for the VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) that comes with the vRLCM (See Environment => Global Environment), a new version ..read more

Desired State monitoring with Terraform? Some time ago, I wrote a post about Terraform and vSphere. In this post, I showed how appliances (.ova files) can be deployed with Terraform. Another use case for Terraform is deploying virtual machines from templates. But with this, we would almost forget the most important use of Terraform, deploying vSphere Infrastructure, in Terraform terminology resources like Clusters, vSwitches, Datastores and more. In doing so, I discovered an interesting feature of Terraform. I’ve long been interested in configuration management for vSphere, see older posts on ..read more

I wrote it in my previous post “In addition, Log Insight has an even larger number of APIs with “Tech Preview” status.”. “Tech Preview” status also means in VMware’s words “Their design or implementation may change without warning and should not be depended on. A tech preview API may become supported, have forwards-incompatible changes or be removed during an upgrade.“. And that is exactly what has happened with the release of Log Insight version 8.8.2 and the API endpoint for groups and roles. By the way, have you also noticed that the Log Insight API has been a version 2 for some time now? T ..read more

Adding Directory Groups A little while ago I wrote about a poc how to use Ansible and a pipeline to upgrade Log Insight. Shortly thereafter, I looked at the capabilities of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (from now on: vRSLCM) and did deployments of Log Insight and vRealize Operations Manager. vRLSCM can take care of some of the configuration of Log Insight, such as NTP, DNS, authentication and Cluster VIPs, in addition to the deployment. Configuration of Directory Groups and Roles, also important, is (currently) not included. If you want to automate the whole process of deployment and config ..read more