Hi vAdmins,
With the introduction of VCF 9 and VCF Operations, we’ve seen a growing need for deeper insight into these useful new capabilities To address this, we’re launching a new series of updates focused on VCF Infrastructure Operations.
In this blog post we will take a closer look at the “Analyze” capabilities!
Intro
Every system administrator knows the challenge of maintaining health and uptime. That’s why the Explore Logs page is designed to be your primary tool for viewing log messages, diagnosing issues, and driving precise root cause analysis. Its robust feature set provides diverse ways to display information, allowing you to efficiently search for the specific events you need and immediately see how they’re affecting your data center. Simply enter keywords, phrases, or globs in the search box to begin your focused investigation.
Pinpointing the Data You Need
To start your investigation, you can easily define the scope of your search by specifying the time range on either the Dashboards or Explore Logs pages. Remember, all time ranges are inclusive when filtering! Beyond time, you can zero in on specific log events by searching for values within particular fields. For highly precise searches, use quotes in the main search field to match exact phrases. When you need to combine multiple terms, a simple space acts as a powerful logical AND operator. It’s also important to note that the search function uses only full tokens; for instance, a search for “err” will not return results containing “error.”
For efficiency and collaboration, you can also consult or save a query to reuse complex search criteria later.
Identify anomalies fast by using the Log Compare feature.
This tool allows you to directly compare logs taken from various time frames or even entirely different log sources.
The Log Compare feature is built to give you deep, comparative insights with maximum efficiency:
- Release Health Checks: Quickly pinpoint new issues or performance degradations introduced by a recent software release or configuration change by easily reviewing the differences between log streams.
- Four-Way Analysis: Simultaneously compare up to four distinct log streams, allowing for a comprehensive, multi-source, or multi-time period analysis in a single view.
- Side-by-Side Resolution: Achieve swift issue resolution by using the side-by-side comparison view, which helps you immediately visualize anomalies and trace the root cause without having to switch between screens.
- Advanced Tools for Deeper Insight:Leverage advanced filters and powerful visualization charts to refine your comparative data set
Intelligent Log Summarization with VCF Operations
Stop being overwhelmed by log volume! VCF Operations for logs uses powerful machine learning to take thousands of individual log entries and summarize them into a manageable number of broad event types.
Here is how this intelligent grouping process helps you:
- Accelerated Troubleshooting:Machine learning groups similar events, providing you with a count for each group. This helps you instantly identify the most communicative (noisy) and the quietest events—both of which are crucial for effective root cause analysis.
- Focused Filtering: These generated event types act as a powerful filter, allowing you to quickly narrow the scope of your log messages and eliminate irrelevant noise, so you can focus on what matters most.
Every new event type discovered by the system is represented as a Smart Field. While you have the flexibility to rename or delete these smart fields, the core definition remains fixed. The default naming convention for these automatically generated fields follows the format: smart field type number [event_type].
As a final visual aid, the static, unchanging portions of an event are displayed in black text, which becomes highlighted when you interact with it.
Spotting Anomalies and Predicting Trends with the Event Trends Tab
To move beyond simple log review, use the Event Trends tab to harness the power of event history for deep analysis. This feature is your key to identifying critical trends and anomalies within your log data, revealing powerful insights like:
- Rate of Change: Track event types that are increasing or decreasing in frequency, along with the precise rates of change, giving you an immediate view of volatile system behavior.
- Unexpected Behavior: Highlight event types that have been newly added to the system, which is crucial for identifying unexpected activity or a previously unseen problem.
- Baseline Stability: Identify event types that are arriving at a constant, steady rate, helping you confirm the stability of core processes.
- System Retirement: Detect event types that are no longer appearing in the system, which can confirm a successful retirement of an old service or, conversely, indicate a silent failure.
Summary
The powerful Analyze tool allows all platforms administrators to view log messages, quickly determine problem areas, and perform definitive root cause analysis to help administrators save time and gain fast insights.
End of this post.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed in this blog are solely my own and should be treated as personal opinions. This content does not hold any legal or authoritative standing.