Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

vCAC is a complex product with a lot of moving parts, it’s a pain to have to switch back & forth between monitoring views in the UI.

The IaaS server is a Windows box, and does most of the heavy lifting so you can’t just SSH in and tail a log file (well, you sort of could…  but)

I like to have all this info on a secondary monitor scrolling past in realtime, mainly so I can look like I am in the Matrix but it’s useful when you’re trying to debug a weird edge-case that only happens in real-time, I achieve this by..

Using mTail on my Windows administrative workstation.

Mapping a drive to the C$ share on my IaaS server

Open the following log files in mTail and put it on a secondary monitor so I can watch what’s going on in real-time (don’t forget to hit start to monitor the file)

\\IaaSserver\c$\Program Files (x86)\VMware\vCAC\Agents\<NAME OF YOUR AGENT(S)>\logs\vSphereAgent.log

\\IaaSserver\c$\c$\Program Files (x86)\VMware\vCAC\Server\Logs\All.log

For good measure you can also open your vCenter log files in the same way if you want to.

Handy hint – if you are tryign to catch a specific errror in the noise of the logs, check the Filter box and put the search expression in – then it will only show when that message occurs in the logs (like doing tail –f <file> | grep “string” in *NIX). you can use the following strings to limit to certain message categories.

[Info]

[Debug]

[Trace]