As part of our goal to continuously improve the customer support experience, Technical Support Engineers (TSEs) can now interactively view the proactive findings and recommendations delivered to customers today within the Skyline Operational Summary Report (OSR). Additionally, within the findings and recommendations, TSEs can view customer environment inventory information along with all Support Requests (SRs) for the particular customer they are assisting. All of this together enables Global Support Services (GSS) to better help our customers. These new capabilities are only available to those customers who have adopted VMware Skyline.

VMware Skyline is available globally to Premier Services customers along with a select number of Production Support customers. If you are interested in receiving proactive support from VMware, show your interest by signing-up for the Managed Access Program. We will continue to invite customers from the Managed Access Program as we scale proactive support services. Additionally, you can ask your VMware Account Team for information about how we’re radically transforming the customer support experience.

Going Beyond Break/Fix

When the circumstances exist that a SR is needed to troubleshoot an issue, TSEs will help the customer resolve the issue. Additionally, they can now review the customer’s proactive findings and recommendations as part of the SR process.

Perhaps the customer experienced an issue that was discovered by Skyline. In that instance, the TSE can immediately assist the customer with determining how many additional objects could be impacted by the same issue. TSEs can now help answer the question, how many more objects could be impacted by the same issue. Furthermore, the recommendation to resolve the issue has already been found, helping expedite the resolution of the issue across all impacted and potentially impacted objects.

Or, if a customer experiences an issue that requires a patch or update, the TSE can review the proactive findings and recommendations to determine if the patch or update required to resolve the original issue, could also resolve additional potential issues. This is not always the case, however, with more information available to TSEs, the better enabled they are to help customers.

Interactive findings and recommendations

Finding Potential Issues

TSEs can now view customer proactive findings and recommendations within a SaaS-based web application. This allows for better search and filter capabilities of findings and recommendations. TSEs can sort by issue severity, quickly looking at all critical findings within a customer’s environment. Or, a TSE can filter for only network-related findings if assisting a customer with a network-related SR. All of this together better enables our TSEs to better serve our customers and assist them beyond just problem resolution.

Technical Support Engineers can sort by issue severity or filter by compute, network or storage

Conclusion

Today, customers who have adopted proactive support with VMware Skyline receive an OSR. Within the OSR, customers are proactively notified of potential risks within their environment. Additionally, recommendations are provided for how to remediate those potential risks. Now, TSEs have this same information at their fingertips and can help customers with understanding potential risk within their VMware environment.

These new enhanced support capabilities are only available to customers who are receiving proactive support with VMware Skyline. This is just one of many steps VMware is taking is radically transform the customer support experience. Additional information about VMware Skyline is below.

Additional Resources

• VMware Skyline
• Managed Access Program (Sign-Up for VMware Skyline)
• Frequently-Asked Questions
• VMware Skyline Community