VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 Release Notes

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 (Build 3571626) Last Document Update: 3 July 2017 Check frequently for additions and updates to these release notes.

These release notes include the following topics:

Introduction to vRealize Log Insight 3.3

VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 delivers the best real-time and archive log management for VMware environments. Machine learning-based Intelligent Grouping and high performance search enables faster troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. vRealize Log Insight can analyze terabytes of logs, discover structure in unstructured data, and deliver enterprise-wide visibility using a modern Web interface.

What's New in vRealize Log Insight 3.3

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes new and enhanced features that cover all major areas of the product including installation, configuration, licensing, alerting, dashboards, reports, and policies. This release introduces the following enhancements.

New and Enhanced Agent Parsers

New Syslog, Labeled Tab-Separated Values (LTSV), and Regex parsers are now available. vRealize Log Insight 3.3 also includes enhancements and improvements to previously released parsers.

New Syslog, Labeled Tab-Separated Values (LTSV), and Regex parsers are now available. vRealize Log Insight 3.3 also includes enhancements and improvements to previously released parsers. New Interactive Analytics

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes a tabular view of chart data to easily spot the top results of an aggregation query. You can also optimize your Interactive Analytics view with a more flexible event display.

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes a tabular view of chart data to easily spot the top results of an aggregation query. You can also optimize your Interactive Analytics view with a more flexible event display. Multiple Virtual IP Addressing

You can configure multiple virtual IP addresses (vIPs) for the Integrated Load Balancer. You can also configure a list of static tags for each vIP so that each log message received from the vIP is annotated with the configured tags.

You can configure multiple virtual IP addresses (vIPs) for the Integrated Load Balancer. You can also configure a list of static tags for each vIP so that each log message received from the vIP is annotated with the configured tags. Alert Webhooks

The new alert notification transport provides event notification over HTTP POST. This enhancement enables potential integrations with other platforms (for example, Slack, SocialCast, etc.).

The new alert notification transport provides event notification over HTTP POST. This enhancement enables potential integrations with other platforms (for example, Slack, SocialCast, etc.). New Product Licensing

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes the ability to use 25 OSI available licenses at no additional cost with the use of a VMware vCenter Server (Standard Edition) installation.

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes the ability to use 25 OSI available licenses at no additional cost with the use of a VMware vCenter Server (Standard Edition) installation. In-Production Cluster Checks

You can query the latest results of in-production cluster checks to verify the status of a cluster or to determine if there are integration issues.

You can query the latest results of in-production cluster checks to verify the status of a cluster or to determine if there are integration issues. New Windows Agent Support

The vRealize Log Insight Windows agent now supports Windows 10.

The vRealize Log Insight Windows agent now supports Windows 10. IPv6 Support for vRealize Log Insight Agents

This release includes support for IPv6. You can now use IPv6 addresses in the same way as IPv4 addresses.

This release includes support for IPv6. You can now use IPv6 addresses in the same way as IPv4 addresses. Query API

You can use the new API to enable remote clients to programmatically query the vRealize Log Insight platform remotely to retrieve events and aggregations over events.

You can use the new API to enable remote clients to programmatically query the vRealize Log Insight platform remotely to retrieve events and aggregations over events. Enhancements The VMware vRealize Log Insight Linux Agent now collects log files rotated with copytruncate.

Preview Features

VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes several features that you can use on a preview basis. Pure IPv6 Support for vRealize Log Insight Server

You can configure a vRealize Log Insight 3.3 cluster in a pure IPv6 mode where all integration end points such as vSphere, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight agents, SMTP, Active Directory, and NFS are IPv6 enabled. Dual stack IPv6 support for server is not supported in this release. Agent Configuration UI

This release also includes a preview of a new graphical editor for agent configuration.

VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes several features that you can use on a preview basis.

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Before You Begin

Review this section before you begin installing and configuring vRealize Log Insight.

Ports Used by vRealize Log Insight

Port 53 TCP and UDP need to be open from all nodes within a cluster for DNS resolution.

Ports 389 TCP and UDP, 636 TCP, 3268 TCP, 3269 TCP, and 88 TCP and UDP need to be open from all nodes within a cluster for Active Directory integration.

An upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 3.3 requires a connection to Ports 80 and 443 on the master node.

For a list of all ports required for correct communication, see Ports and External Interfaces that the vRealize Log Insight Virtual Appliance Uses in the vRealize Log Insight Security Guide.

Virtual Appliance Deployment

Use the instructions in the vRealize Log Insight Getting Started Guide to install and configure the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance.

Always configure the master node in a cluster setup of vRealize Log Insight with a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and a static IP address.

It is highly recommended that you configure a minimum of three nodes in a vRealize Log Insight cluster to provide ingestion, configuration, and user space high availability. Two node clusters are not supported.

vRealize Log Insight does not support removing worker nodes that are functioning correctly from a vRealize Log Insight cluster.

Important Security Updates

Before installing or upgrading software, be sure to review the latest security advisories on the VMware Security Advisories site.

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes a critical fix that address the CVE-2015-7547: glibc getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow issue. On February 16, 2016 a critical vulnerability in glibc (CVE-2015-7547) was published that may allow for remote code execution. This issue affects all versions of glibc since 2.9. If you are using software that includes glibc 2.9 and later, it is recommended that you upgrade to a version that contains the fix to eliminate this vulnerability.

IT decision makers, architects, administrators, and others who must be aware of the security components of vRealize Log Insight must familiarize themselves with the vRealize Log Insight Security Guide.

For details about how to secure your environment, see the Security guide and the VMware Security Advisories site.



Note: vRealize Log Insight runs its processes as root user of the virtual appliance. This might cause security risks to your environment. Always deploy vRealize Log Insight in trusted secure environments.

Licensing vRealize Log Insight 3.3

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 includes the ability to use 25 OSI available licenses at no additional cost with a VMware vCenter Server (Standard Edition) installation. For more information about licenses, see vRealize Log Insight for vCenter FAQ - VMware Cloud Management and the Assign a Permanent License to vRealize Log Insight topic in the vRealize Log Insight Administration Guide.

After you deploy the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance, you must assign a valid license key. You can assign one of the following licenses: Operating Systems Instance (OSI) Evaluation (Standard Edition) Stand-Alone (Standard Edition) vRealize Suite (Standard Edition) vCenter Server (Limited Edition) Not For Resale (NFR) (Standard Edition) If a valid license key is not configured, vRealize Log Insight will not allow you to query the logs.

All license management tasks are performed in the vRealize Log Insight Administration Web interface. The URL is http://log-insight-ip/admin/license , where log-insight-ip is the IP address of the vRealize Log Insight vApp. Follow the instructions in the vRealize Log Insight Administration Guide to assign a license.

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Compatibility

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 supports the following VMware products and versions:

Log Insight can pull events, tasks, and alarms data from VMware vCenter Server 5.0 or later.

ESXi 5.0 or later hosts can be configured to push syslog data to vRealize Log Insight.

You can integrate vRealize Log Insight with vRealize Operations Manager as follows. The vCenter Operations Manager version must be 5.8.5 or later. The vRealize Operations Manager version must be 6.0 or later. You can remove the vRealize Log Insight adapter that enables launch in context: From Administration > Solutions in vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.x. From the Administration user interface in vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.5.



Browser Support

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 version supports the following browser versions. More recent browser versions also work with vRealize Log Insight, but have not been validated.

Mozilla Firefox 38.0 and above

Google Chrome 43.0 and above

Safari 6.0 and above

Internet Explorer 11.0 and above

Note: Internet Explorer Document mode must be used in Standards Mode. Other modes are not supported. The Compatibility View browser mode is not supported.

The minimum supported browser resolution is 1280 by 800 pixels.

Important: Cookies must be enabled in your browser.

vRealize Log Insight Windows Agent Support

The vRealize Log Insight 3.3 Windows agent supports the following versions.

Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10

Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2

vRealize Log Insight Linux Agent Support

The vRealize Log Insight 3.3 Linux agent supports the following distributions and versions.

RHEL 5 Update 10, RHEL 6 Update 5

SLES 11 SP3

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS

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Limitations

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 has the following limitations:

General

vRealize Log Insight does not handle non-printable ASCII characters correctly.

vRealize Log Insight does not support printing. However, you can use the Print options of your browser. The printed results might vary depending on the browser that you use. We recommend Internet Explorer 11 or Firefox for printing vRealize Log Insight user interface.

The hosts table might display devices more than once.

The hosts table might display devices more than once with each in different formats, including some combination of IP address, hostname, and FQDN. For example, a device named foo.bar.com might appear as both foo and foo.bar.com.

The hosts table uses the hostname field that is defined in the syslog RFC. If an event sent by a device over the syslog protocol does not have a hostname, vRealize Log Insight uses the source as the hostname. This might result in the device being listed more than once because vRealize Log Insight cannot determine if the two formats point to the same device.

vRealize Log Insight Windows and Linux Agents

Non-ASCII characters in hostname / source fields are not delivered correctly when vRealize Log Insight Windows and Linux agents are running in syslog mode.

vRealize Log Insight Windows Agent

The vRealize Log Insight Windows agent is a 32-bit application and all its requests for opening files from C:\Windows\System32 sub-directories are redirected by WOW64 to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 . However, you can configure the vRealize Log Insight Windows agent to collect from C:\Windows\System32 by using the special alias C:\Windows\Sysnative . For example, to collect logs from their default location for the MS DHCP Server, add the following line to the corresponding section of the vRealize Log Insight Windows agent configuration file: directory=C:\Windows\Sysnative\dhcp .

vRealize Log Insight Linux Agent

Due to an OS limitation, the vRealize Log Insight Linux agent does not detect network outages when configured to send events over syslog.

The vRealize Log Insight Linux agent does not support non-English (UTF-8) symbols in field or tag names.

The vRealize Log Insight Linux agent collects hidden files and directories by default. To prevent this, you must add an exclude=.* option to every configuration section. The option exclude uses the glob pattern .* which represents hidden file format.

option to every configuration section. The option uses the glob pattern which represents hidden file format. When standard output redirection to a file is used to produce logs, the vRealize Log Insight agent might not correctly recognize event boundaries in such log files.

Active Directory

vRealize Log Insight does not support multiple domains for Active Directory login when they are not trusted domains.

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Upgrading from a Previous Version of vRealize Log Insight

vRealize Log Insight vRealize Log Insight 3.3 supports upgrading from vRealize Log Insight 3.0. For more information, see the vRealize Log Insight Upgrade Path.

Important

When performing a manual upgrade, workers must only be upgraded one at a time. Upgrading multiple workers at the same time will cause an upgrade failure. When you upgrade the master node to vRealize Log Insight 3.3, a rolling upgrade occurs unless specifically disabled.

To upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 3.3, you must first upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 3.0 and then upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 3.3.

vRealize Log Insight does not support two node clusters and vRealize Log Insight 3.0 does not support upgrading a 2-node vRealize Log Insight 2.5 cluster to vRealize Log Insight 3.0. Add another node before upgrading to vRealize Log Insight 3.0.

Upgrading vRealize Log Insight 3.0 to vRealize Log Insight 3.3 must be done from the master node's FQDN. Upgrading using the Integrated Load Balancer IP address is not supported.

Internationalization Support

vRealize Log Insight 3.3 is available in the following languages:

The vRealize Log Insight server web user interface is localized to Japanese, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

The vRealize Log Insight server Web user interface supports Unicode data, including machine learning features.

The vRealize Log Insight agent works on non-English native Windows.

Limitations

The agent installer and content pack are not localized. Parts of the vRealize Log Insight server Web user interface might still show strings and have layout issues.

vRealize Log Insight is interoperable with localized versions of vCenter Server and vRealize Operations Manager. However, Content Packs depend on matching non-localized log messages. vCenter Server events are retrieved in its default locale, which should be set to en_US. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2121646.

Integration with Active Directory, vSphere and vRealize Operations Manager for user names with non-ASCII characters is not supported.

The date/time calendar format shown on the vRealize Log Insight server Web user interface is English only and does not display language/locale settings.

Localization of event logs is not supported. Event logs only support UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encoding

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Product Documentation

In addition to these Release Notes, you can access the complete documentation set for vRealize Log Insight 3.3 from the VMware vRealize Log Insight Documentation website.

Resolved Issues

This section contains issues that have been resolved since the vRealize Log Insight 3.0 release.

CVE-2015-7547: glibc getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow

On February 16, 2016 a critical vulnerability in glibc (CVE-2015-7547) was published that may allow for remote code execution. This issue affects all versions of glibc since 2.9. If you are using software that includes glibc 2.9 and later, it is recommended that you upgrade to a version that contains the fix to eliminate this vulnerability. Check the VMware vRealize Log Insight Documentation for information about upgrading VMware vRealize Log Insight and the available upgrade paths. For additional information on this issue, see Knowledge Base article 2144108. VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 contains the fix that addresses this issue.



On February 16, 2016 a critical vulnerability in glibc (CVE-2015-7547) was published that may allow for remote code execution. This issue affects all versions of glibc since 2.9. If you are using software that includes glibc 2.9 and later, it is recommended that you upgrade to a version that contains the fix to eliminate this vulnerability. Check the VMware vRealize Log Insight Documentation for information about upgrading VMware vRealize Log Insight and the available upgrade paths. For additional information on this issue, see Knowledge Base article 2144108. Long login times may occur when using the LDAP authentication Active Directory integration. Deeply nested groups can cause slow login times.

Deeply nested groups can cause slow login times. The disk space in the /tmp directory fills with response bodies.

Response bodies are not cleaned up properly on failed API calls.

Response bodies are not cleaned up properly on failed API calls. vRealize Log Insight alerts to vRealize Operations Manager triggers incorrect notifications.

vRealize Log Insight produces intermittent alerts and the content of the notification event within vRealize Operations Manager contains false data.



vRealize Log Insight produces intermittent alerts and the content of the notification event within vRealize Operations Manager contains false data. Disk resize fails intermittently.

After adding hard drives and performing a reboot, vRealize Log Insight does not see the added disks and does not increase the storage.



After adding hard drives and performing a reboot, vRealize Log Insight does not see the added disks and does not increase the storage. vRealize Log Insight fails to start.

vRealize Log Insight fails to start because Cassandra times out.



vRealize Log Insight fails to start because Cassandra times out. vRealize Log Insight restarts consistently and alerts on the restarts.

vRealize Log Insight stores index files on the disk associated with each bucket. There are large numbers of open file handles to these indexes, for active buckets, which have been deleted. Each open reference to an index file consumes resources. This can lead to vRealize Log Insight running out of memory.



vRealize Log Insight stores index files on the disk associated with each bucket. There are large numbers of open file handles to these indexes, for active buckets, which have been deleted. Each open reference to an index file consumes resources. This can lead to vRealize Log Insight running out of memory. Custom time range drifts backward

Some events in the last 5 minutes do not show up if a custom time range is defined.



Some events in the last 5 minutes do not show up if a custom time range is defined. The search results from the alert email links are not correct.

Clicking the search results link in the alert email takes you to the last five minutes instead of the time period when then the alert occured.



Clicking the search results link in the alert email takes you to the last five minutes instead of the time period when then the alert occured. vRealize Log Insight alerts are not associated with the correct vRealize Operations object.

Virtual machines with duplicate agent IDs lead to the wrong vRealize Operations ID associations.



Virtual machines with duplicate agent IDs lead to the wrong vRealize Operations ID associations. Log messages are truncated too short in emailed alerts.

The maximum length of a message in an email is not configurable.



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Known Issues

This section contains known issues for this release.

Deployment and Configuration