ESXi Syslog Server Check Plugin for vCheck6

I remember back to a London VMUG long ago a presentation about differences to watch out for between ESX and ESXi during the version 3.5 days. The one that got most people looking around at each other saying “oops, I don’t think we knew that” was configuring a Syslog server for your ESXi servers. vCenter 5 now includes it’s own built in Syslog server so there’s no excuse. Alternatives, such as Kiwi Syslog Server, are available if you don’t want to use the vCenter 5 syslog server. There’s a lot more awareness about needing one now, but it has still burnt me in a couple of environments I have worked on recently, where there was a need to review logs after an issue and no central logging had been configured for the hosts in question.

So this additional plugin for vCenter will highlight any ESXi hosts which have not been configured with the correct Syslog server.

In a previous post I detailed how to add your own plugin to vCheck 6. You can either do that for the below plugin, download it from the plugins section on Alan’s site or it is also included as part of the vCheck 6.10 release. There are now 70+ plugins for vCheck thanks to some great community contributions!

$Title = "Syslog Name" $Header =  "Syslog Issues" $Comments = "The following hosts do not have the correct Syslog settings which may cause issues if ESXi hosts experience issues and logs need to be investigated" $Display = "Table" $Author = "Jonathan Medd" $Version = 1.0

\# Start of Settings # The Syslog server which should be set on your hosts $SyslogServer ="SyslogServer" # End of Settings

@($VMH | Where-Object {$\_.ExtensionData.Summary.Config.Product.Name -eq 'VMware ESXi'} | Select-Object Name,@{Name='SyslogServer';Expression = {($\_ | Get-VMHostSysLogServer).Host}} | Where-Object {$\_.SyslogServer -ne $syslogserver})