From the course: vSphere 6.7 Professional Part 08: Troubleshooting

Working with vCenter 6.7 logs

- In this video, I'll demonstrate how to change the logging level for vCenter. And I'll also show you how to export log and diagnostic data, when VMware Support requests that you do so. So I'm going to start by going to Hosts and Clusters here, and clicking on my vCenter server. And on the vCenter server, I'm going to click on Configure, and under these General vCenter Server Settings, one of the settings that we can configure is the logging options, so I'll click on Edit here. And for the logging options by default, vCenter is set to info. You don't want to change this, unless VMware Support requests that you change it. So if they request you to change it to verbose or trivia, for example, that means they want you to collect a whole lot more logging information than you normally would, under typical circumstances. So if there's a really tough problem, VMware Support may ask you to up your log level so they can gather even more data. But most of the time you're best off just leaving it here at the default log level of info. So I'll cancel out of this, and let's say you are working with VMware Support, and they request that you export log data. Here's how you do it. Just simply click on Actions here for vCenter, and choose the Export System Logs option. And here, I'll choose which ESXI hosts I want to export log information for, I've got three hosts in my environment, I'll choose all three. And then, do I want to include the vCenter logs and the vSphere User Interface client logs? I'm going to go ahead and include all of these logs. Now, that being said, basically what you want to do here is grab whatever VMware Support is asking you to grab. So they might not want all this information. I'll just export it all, for this particular demo. And then I'll choose the different logs. So, do I just want to look at, for example, configuration changes that have been made, or active directory logs, or hardware logs, or something like that. Again, go with whatever VMware Support is requesting here. Whatever they're requesting, that's what we want to give them. So we want to kind of zoom down to the granular issue that they're trying to deal with. So maybe, for example, they think there's a hardware problem. Well, in that case, maybe I'll just pull the hardware logs. So in this scenario, I'll just go ahead and select all of these logs, and then I can also choose to gather performance data for a certain interval as well. So if I want to send along performance data, I can do that, and then I can also supply the password for encrypted core dumps. So what does this mean? Well, vSphere 6.7 provides support for encrypting of core dumps. What a core dump is, is if my ESXI host crashes, it dumps the contents of memory to something called a core dump. So we may want to encrypt those core dumps, for security purposes, that way somebody isn't able to access the contents of memory in an unencrypted fashion. In my environment, I haven't enabled encrypted core dumps. So I'm not going to need to supply a password for those, here. And then I'll just click on Export Logs. And that'll kick off the download of the log files that I've requested from vCenter. So I'll pause my recording for a moment while this process completes. All right, so here we can see that my bundle of exported log files from vCenter is complete, and I've got all these files here that I can now send off to VMware Support, so they can open these up and analyze them to help you deal with whatever issues may be occurring in your environment. There's a set of log files here, one is specific to vCenter. The other three log files, each of those are specific to one of my ESXI hosts. So the files that are actually downloaded are in TGZ format. And so I'm just going to grab this first ESXI host log bundle here, and double click it, and I've configured my TGZ files to open with WinRAR. So you could use WinZip, WinRAR, whatever you want to extract the contents of this bundle. And then you can take a look through the log files if you'd like to. So let me just open up action.log, so that you can get an idea of what these log files look like. So there's all sorts of information in here that may be useful to VMware Support, and it can be somewhat challenging to dig through all of this data and figure out what these log files actually mean. Here's the TGZ file for the vCenter server appliance, and again I can go ahead and work through these logs here, and analyze the contents of them if I'd like to do so. But most of the time, what you'll end up doing is just simply downloading these log files, and sending them off to VMware Support, so that they can analyze them.

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