Reviewing logs

[David Freiberger]

I'm forcing myself to use PowerCLI more and something I'd like to be more proficient in is troubleshooting issues.  I've been running the get-vievent command and I assume that's the equivalent of looking at the events for a VM.  I know we also have vmware.log files out there but there is a whole lot of info in those.  Is there any documentation that explains what the vmware.log files would be good for and what to look for?  Something I'm chasing down now is when a VM was originally built.  I'm not sure if this was manually spun up, cloned, or if this was deployed from a template.

[LucD]

These logs need to be enabled and their rotation needs to be configured.
See Manage the Amount of Virtual Machine Log Data (vmware.com)
What exactly can be found in there is not documented anywhere in detail afaik.

A VM's creation date, and the method by which it was created can be found in the Tasks & Events (Get-VIEvent), but if depends on how long these Tasks & Events are kept on the VCSA.