Update: Special thanks to Yogita N. Patil and VMware Technical Support for their assistance with the issues below!

Last week, I was trying to integrate vRealize Log Insight with vRealize Operations (vROps) so that I could ‘launch in context’ from vROps. This adds a context-sensitive action to vROps that lets you pull up Log Insight’s Interactive Analysis feature against the alert or object you are currently viewing. This makes it easy to drill down into logs with a lot less clicking around:

Launch in context is a feature in vRealize Operations Manager that lets you launch an external application via URL in a specific context. The context is defined by the active UI element and object selection. Launch in context lets the vRealize Log Insight adapter add menu items to a number of different views within the Custom user interface and the vSphere user interface of vRealize Operations Manager.

The documentation to enable this features seems pretty simple. I ran into a few problems, though…

The requirements are pretty simple, but were the first thing to trip me up. You want to be on Log Insight 3.6 and vROps 6.3. While Log Insight had been upgraded a day or two earlier, vROps was at 6.1. When performing the upgrade of vROps, it did not register its extension properly! Going into the Managed Object Browser showed there was still a vCOps 6.1 registration instance (yes, the extension is still called vCOps!). In addition, the extension was registered by IP, not by DNS. The extension needs to be in place for the steps below, or you receive even more opaque error messages, so I encourage you to verify it now. You can investigate your own MOB at a link similar to https://vcsa.fqdn.example.com/mob, and specifically look at the vROps extension at https://vcsa.fqdn.example.com/mob/?moid=ExtensionManager&doPath=extensionList%5B“com.vmware.vcops”%5D.client

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