How to incease days logs are stored

[Hans Meiser]

Hello,

from time to time we have the problem, that our backupsoftware is not able to log in into our VCenter at night. It is not very often, may be every 2-3 months one failure.

Logs on backupsoftware are complete and i can at least found an error on clientside. the problem is finding the logs on VCenter.

Currently i believe that i should find loginfailures on VCenter by ssh in /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log
But this log seems to have to process a lot of data and accordingly fast the log is rotating and compressing old ones. This happens so fast that i can not find the real errors from nighttime. The problems happens at 1 a.m. and if i check the logs at ~8 a.m. i just can see backwards to ~5 a.m. So it is not possible for me to find the real reason for my loginproblem.

Am i correct that /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log is the right logfile for such cases?
How to increase amount of time to keep the logs? It should be possible to analyze the whole preceding night at morning.

Thank you,
Hans

[Andrea Consalvi]

Hi Hans,

Yes, /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log is the correct log to check for vCenter login activity, especially related to services or API calls like from backup software. If you want to increase the retention of logs and avoid missing entries during the night, you can adjust the log rotation settings by editing the vCenter’s syslog configuration.

Try this:

vi /etc/logrotate.d/vmware-vpxd 

In that file, look for values like:

rotate 7
daily
compress

You can change rotate 7 to a higher number (like rotate 14 for 2 weeks) and even switch daily to weekly if that fits your logging pattern better.

After editing, you can apply the changes manually with:

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/vmware-vpxd 

Also make sure that the disk space on /var is sufficient to store the uncompressed logs for the period you need.

[Hans Meiser]

Hello Andrea,

iam confused. I think you ansered a question of an other Communityuser? I cant see a relation to my question or i do i muss something?

;)

Hans

[Andrea Consalvi]

Hi Hans,
You're right, I replied to the wrong post ^_^...
I’ve edited the post to try and give a proper answer to your issue. Hope it helps.