VMware View log viewing

With the addition of VMware View your environment gains complexity. Before adding components like VMware View or Lab Manager you only have one point of logging in your virtual enviroment, vCenter Server. Now you have to look into the textfiles itself if you want to do some real troubleshooting.

When I had to do some troubleshooting last week for VMware View I found that it was a pain in the butt to search through the logfiles of VDM, which are placed like other VMware (text)logs under \Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\

After setting the logfile from the VDM server I noticed that it uses log4j, a logging mechanism for Java applications. After some more googling I found out that you can use Chainsaw from Apache for logparsing.

To watch a logfile add a new receiver (LogFilePatternReceiver) with the following settings for VDM

fileURL: file:///c:/vdmlogfiles/logs/log-2009-04-26.txt
logFormat: PROP(RELATIVETIME) LEVEL LOGGER [THREAD] MESSAGE
name: vdmlog
tailing: false

You can leave filter expression empty. If you enter text here it will filter the logfile before it parses it.

You can also set tailing to true if you are watching a live logfile (Haven’t tried it with VDM though).

Click the picture to see how it looks. With Chainsaw you can easily focus on different parts of the logfile just by rightclicking an item in the left pane and select “Focus on”.

With Chainsaw it is also possible to read other logfiles like the VMware Update Manager logfile.