VMware Log Insight
Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project, not affiliated with,
endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware", "vSphere",
and "Aria" are trademarks of Broadcom. Source is publicly auditable under the MIT license.
Read-only log search and aggregation for VMware Aria Operations for Logs
(formerly vRealize Log Insight) — the appliance that collects syslog from ESXi
hosts, vCenter, and VMs. The centralized-log data source for the VMware skill
family. Strictly non-destructive: it queries, it never writes.
Companion Skills
| Need | Skill | Tools |
|---|
| Raw centralized logs + spikes | vmware-log-insight (this) | 7 |
| vCenter events & alarms | vmware-monitor | 27 |
| Metrics, anomalies, capacity | vmware-aria | 28 |
| Incident correlation / root cause | vmware-debug — feed it log_search output | 2 |
| VM lifecycle / operations | vmware-aiops | 49 |
Install
uv tool install vmware-log-insight
mkdir -p ~/.vmware-log-insight
cp config.example.yaml ~/.vmware-log-insight/config.yaml
echo 'VMWARE_LOG_INSIGHT_PROD_PASSWORD=...' > ~/.vmware-log-insight/.env
chmod 600 ~/.vmware-log-insight/.env
vmware-log-insight doctor
Offline / Air-Gapped Install (from source)
This project uses the modern PEP 517 build system (hatchling), so there is no
setup.py by design — that is expected, not a missing file. If you cloned the
source and hit ERROR: File "setup.py" or "setup.cfg" not found ... editable mode currently requires a setuptools-based build, your pip is older than 21.3 and
cannot do an editable (-e) install with a non-setuptools backend. Editable
mode is a developer convenience, not needed to run the tool — do one of:
pip install .
pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -e .
For a truly air-gapped host, build the wheels on a connected machine and copy
them over — the target then needs no network:
pip wheel . -w dist
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-log-insight
| Tool | What |
|---|
log_search | Search events by time window + text + filters |
log_aggregate | Count/aggregate over time bins, with z-score spike detection |
log_fields | List extracted fields usable in filters |
log_version | Appliance version/build |
alert_list / alert_get / alert_history | Query defined alerts and their trigger history |
Workflows
- Find errors fast —
vmware-log-insight search -q error -l 1h.
- Where did logs burst? —
vmware-log-insight aggregate -q error -l 6h --bin-ms 300000, read spikes[], then search the spike window.
- Root cause — pass
log_search results (plus vCenter events from vmware-monitor and metrics from vmware-aria) to vmware-debug incident_timeline.
Troubleshooting
401 on /sessions → check username/password/provider and the VMWARE_LOG_INSIGHT_<TARGET>_PASSWORD env var.503 everywhere → appliance starting up; doctor reports it as a status, not a crash.- Empty results → widen
--last; default API port is 9543 (set port if different).
Security
Read-only by construction. Credentials in ~/.vmware-log-insight/.env (chmod 600);
plaintext passwords auto-obfuscated to grep-safe b64: (obfuscation, not
encryption — inject from a secret manager for real secrecy). TLS on by default.
See SECURITY.md.
License
MIT.