Runecast Analyzer is a proactive issue prevention solution for your VMware vSphere environment that offers some analysis to check the status of your infrastructure.
Once the product has been installed and configured, the scan of your environment produces some reports ready to be analyzed.
Blog series
Runecast Analyzer setup – pt.1
Runecast Analyzer analysis – pt.2
Access the Dashboard
Login to the appliance by entering the correct credentials then click Login.
Dashboard
From the Dashboard you have a global overview of the status of your environment with some info like the number of issues found, configuration items with issues and the top 10 configuration items with the highest number of issues.
Inventory
From the Inventory you can check a specific component of your virtual infrastructure with four available categories: Compute, VMs, Storage and Network. From the Inventory menu, select the category and the desired component to analyze (i.e. cluster).
In the right pane, the system displays the issues found related to the selected component. Click on the plus "+" symbol for the details. You can also use the Filter function to filter the issues by Severity or Source.
The description of the selected warning.
Issue List
This view displays all the issues found in the inventory showing the number of objects affected by the problem.
Click on the plus "+" symbol for the details.
All KBs
This view shows the list of used KB articles used for analysis without showing the actual issues detected on your environment.
Configuration analysis
This section displays the configuration issues that were detected during the scan of the environment and analyzing the configuration settings.
KBs Discovered
From the KBs Discovered you can check the detected issues derived from VMware Knowledge Base articles.
Best Practices
The configuration items are checked against VMware best practices. The result of the analysis is reported in the following way:
- Pass - if a best practice is followed for the related objects
- Fail - if a best practice it is not followed for at least one of the affected objects
Security Hardening
This view shows the security rules to apply based on the official VMware Security Hardening guides. If one object is not compliant with a specific security check, this check will be marked as Fail.
The Severity warning depends on the security check:
- Low: intended for highly secure environments only
- Medium: related to common environments
- Major: related to any environment
Log analysis
This section contains views related to log analysis. Logs from hosts and VMs can be redirected to the VA to be analyzed.
KBs discovered
Based on a configurable period of time, a notification is displayed if a log pattern described in the VMware KB articles is found on your logs.
Verbose dashboards
Common error messages from the logs are tagged by Runecast and represented in a historical chart ready to be examined. Before using this view, you need to configure the syslog.
Configure the syslog
When you access the Verbose dashboards and no syslog has been configured yet, you receive a warning message. Click on the Log Analysis - Status link to be redirected to the Status page.
To setup the Host syslog, click on the settings icon.
Select the hosts to enable syslog and click Configure.
Click OK to confirm.
The syslog in the selected hosts is now enabled. Click Close to exit.
In the Status page you can check the enabled hosts.
Access the Verbose dashboards view to see the collected data from the configured hosts.
Status
From this page you can check the status of the log collector and perform automatic log configuration for your ESXi hosts and VMs.
Runecast Analyzer allows the administrators to keep the health status of the environment under control avoiding services interruption and possible issues.
