ESX Syslog - Loud and Proud

We recently started pumping our ESX syslog data to our centralized syslog server and quickly found out that ESX likes to talk. We noticed our ESX servers were clocking hundreds of millions of logs, a lot of info which we probably don't need. What we found was by default ESX is set to send verbose logs... which is essentially Debug and above.

See the below table for all severity levels and a short description.
This table is borrowed from the Syslog Wikipedia page...

Severity level

Value	Severity	Keyword	Description	Examples
0	Emergency	emerg	System is unusable	This level should not be used by applications.
1	Alert	alert	Should be corrected immediately	Loss of the primary ISP connection.
2	Critical	crit	Critical conditions	A failure in the system's primary application.
3	Error	err	Error conditions	An application has exceeded its file storage limit and attempts to write are failing.
4	Warning	warning	May indicate that an error will occur if action is not taken.	A non-root file system has only 2GB remaining.
5	Notice	notice	Events that are unusual, but not error conditions.
6	Informational	info	Normal operational messages that require no action.	An application has started, paused or ended successfully.
7	Debug	debug	Information useful to developers for debugging the application.

To tone this down a bit you can change the level at which ESX sends logs.
For ESX 3.5/4.1 see the following link...

For ESX 5.1 +

Using vSphere click on a host to manage then choose the configuration tab of the host

Under Software | Advanced Settings | Config | HostAgent | log

Decrease the config.HostAgent.log.level to 'panic', 'error', 'warning or 'info' rather than 'verbose.