Many customers have been using the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator Content Packs for Log Insight, which is awesome! For those that have been using  the content packs for a few releases, you know that the content packs have often required updates along with product upgrades. At times, we’ve had to release completely new content packs, while keeping the older versions available in the Marketplace, due to incompatibility of new content packs with older versions of vRA. This has caused some confusion as the Marketplace doesn’t provide an alert to a new version when a completely new content pack is released. This post is intended to address some of the confusion and help you ensure you have the right version of the Log Insight content packs and agents for the version of vRA and vRO you are running.

Current vRA 7 and vRO Content Packs

There are currently two versions of the vRealize Automation 7 Content Pack in the Log Insight Marketplace:

And for vRealize Orchestrator, there are also two:

Why so many, you ask? Honestly, the primary driver has been changes and improvements in the log files, which often impacts both queries and agent configuration needed. This is a never-ending process, as engineering are always trying to make it easier to traverse logs and provide consistency.

The vRA 7 v1.5 Content Pack contains some queries that are only valid in vRA 7.1 and newer, including those focused on tracking all logs for a specific catalog request. Those with special compatible requirements are noted in the query information.

The vRA 7.3 v2.1 Content Pack supports the latest releases of vRA, but has different agent group configurations for 7.3 and 7.3.1/7.4 for some of the IaaS components. The date formats of these logs were changed for consistency.

Upgrading vRA/vRO and the Content Packs

Upgrading vRealize Automation from 7.2 or earlier release to 7.3 or newer release will require un-installing the vRA7 1.5 Content Pack installing and reconfiguring the newer vRA 7.3 v2.1 content pack. The changes necessary to the queries made this a mandatory design decision. Because v2.1 has a new namespace, it will not appear as an upgrade in the in-app Market Place. The same is true if you are upgrading from vRealize Orchestrator 7.0 to a newer release, for the vRO content pack.

Configuring the vRA Content Pack 2.1

The primary difference between 2.0 and 2.1 of the vRA 7.3 content pack is the updates to the Agent Group template for the Windows components to support the date formats of logs for both vRA 7.3 and 7.3.1+. The  vRA Windows Agent group has always required manual configurations for directories which are unique per installation (as host name is embedded in folder path name). Now you will also need to manually configure the vra-dem, vra-dem-metrics and vra-deo sections according to the version you are using. The versions for 7.3.1+ are shown in the filelog headers.

You can comment out or remove the unneeded sections after you copy the Agent Group template. You will need to do this for each of the three log sections mentioned above.

Happy troubleshooting!