Monitoring OnApp for VCD with Papertrail Log Management Tool made easy with Bobcares by your side. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our DigitalOcean Management Service.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team is ready to help customers monitor OnApp for VCD with Papertrail Log Management Tool.

How to monitor OnApp for VCD with Papertrail Log Management Tool

OnApp offers in-detail logging set by default, making it easy to troubleshoot errors or monitor the VCD system status. Unfortunately, this can result in large log files. Our Support Techs recommend using a logging tool like the Papertrail Log Management Tool to analyze these logs.

Using Papertrail entails signing up for an account and then logging in to the dashboard. This is where we will be adding it to the first system.

In fact, this system will be the OnApp controller, enabling us to log into it via SSH and then run commands it lists. We can also choose to automate the initial setup by running an online command that looks like this:

wget -qO - --header="X-Papertrail-Token: xhxhASnX5nucRPFrH9XZ" \ https://papertrailapp.com/destinations/3809456/setup.sh | sudo bash

After running this code, we have to configure the remote_syslog in order to gather all OnApp logs.

In this article, our Support Techs are going to take us through:

• Installing and configuring remote_syslog
• Saving searches and alerts

How to Install & Configure remote_syslog

1. First, download the latest remote_syslog version from this link.
2. Then, unpack the download with this command:

   tar xzf ./remote_syslog*.tar.gz
3. Next, execute the following command to open the remote_syslog directory:

   cd remote_syslog
4. After that, we have to copy remote_syslog to the /usr/local/bin directory.
5. Next, download the configure file from this link and edit the Papertrail host, and port to the ones we are using in the dashboard.
6. Then, download this file and place it in the /etc/init.d/remote_syslog.
7. Now it is time to execute the command below to launch Papertrail on startup:

   update-rc.d remote_syslog defaults
8. Finally, start the service with this command:

   service remove_syslog start

After this, we will be able to view the live logs during processing via the dashboard of the system in Papertrail.

How to Save Searches & Alerts

After the installation and configuration of Papertrail, it is time to configure searches and alert email addresses according to the search results. Our Support Team has a recent example where they helped a customer set up searches and alerts for Papertrail under:

• Daily resync
• Performance metric tracking
• Failures during import or resync procedure

Daily resync

In this scenario, the OnApp runs a resync of the VCD environment and OnApp at 1 am to confirm the assets within OnApp are up-to-date and are in sync with the ones in Vmware Cloud Director.

We can access the search criterion according to these requirements with the following search query:

program:production_vcloud.log AND "Daily resync"

Performance metric tracking

OnApp runs an L2 stats transaction at an interval of 3 minutes by default. If this is interrupted, it results in blank entries in the performance metrics for virtual servers within the environment. According to our Support Techs, setting the frequency of this alert to 24 hours will resolve this.

The following search criterion will give us an output of all L2 stat collections so that they run without any further trouble:

program:production_vcloud_stats_runner.log AND "[L2]"

Failures during import or resync procedure

This search criterion is responsible for looking for any failure during the import. Additionally, we can configure this so that we receive the alert via email and also resolve any failures that may have occurred:

program:production_vcloud.log AND “failure”

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Conclusion

To conclude, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated monitoring OnApp for VCD with Papertrail Log Management Tool.