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.

Upgrading to 2.0

2.0 renames all 7 MCP tools so every name starts with a verb (e.g. alert_get → get_log_alert, alert_history → get_log_alert_history, alert_list → list_log_alerts). The full old → new table is in RELEASE_NOTES.md. Nothing else changes: same tools, parameters, safety gates and CLI commands. If an agent prompt, script or ~/.vmware/rules.yaml names a tool, update it — though deny rules written with the old names keep working with vmware-policy ≥ 1.18 (vmware-audit policy lists any rule the renames widened), and vmware-pilot ≥ 1.13 translates old names in saved workflows. If an install older than 2.0 shares that rules.yaml, give it vmware-policy ≥ 1.18.2 too: it matches each rule against both the old and the new name, so one file serves both.

Companion Skills

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)

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 search_logs results (plus vCenter events from vmware-monitor and metrics from vmware-aria) to vmware-debug build_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.