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   # edit host/username/provider
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:

# From the source tree — a normal (non-editable) install builds a wheel:
pip install .              # NOT  pip install -e .

# ...or upgrade pip first, and editable works too:
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:

# On a connected machine, collect this package + its dependencies as wheels:
pip wheel . -w dist        # → dist/*.whl   (or: uv build, for just this package)

# Copy dist/ to the air-gapped host, then install offline:
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-log-insight

MCP Tools (7 — all read-only)

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.