VMware Skyline™ is radically transforming customer support

By: Dale Ferrario

Customers like you that run business-critical operations on VMware environments need an infrastructure that’s always-on and optimized for peak performance. You expect fast, environment-specific remediation recommendations, and proactive analytics that identify problems before they occur.

We’re addressing these needs with VMware Skyline™: an innovative support technology, developed entirely by VMware Engineering, that provides VMware technical support engineers with extreme visibility into your environment.

Imagine if we knew your environment as well as you do. We could tell you – in advance – of a problem you’d have in the future. And then we gave you proactive, prescriptive, and predictive recommendations to fix the issue. And if you do need to call us with a problem, we have the visibility into your environment that lets us quickly diagnose your situation without a lot of effort and hours on your part.

Here’s how it works. Customers with active support subscriptions install the VMware Skyline Collector, a standalone appliance that automatically and securely collects product usage data such as configuration, feature, and performance data.

It then listens for changes, events and patterns and analyzes the information using a robust rules and machine learning engine. The rules engine is where an ever-growing library of support intelligence, product knowledge, and logic is stored to analyze inbound streams of product information.

It will alert when a customer has deviated from a VMware Validated Design or needs to align to a best practice configurations or patch level. Issues identified are fed into the analytics library – consisting of hundreds of detection rules – to allow us to solve the issue for multiple customers.

And you can rest assured knowing that we take privacy and security seriously – VMware Skyline has a robust privacy program. Customer data is transferred to VMware over an encrypted channel and is stored in a secure VMware repository in the US, operated by VMware.

Then the VMware Technical Support Engineer takes the analyzed, environment-specific data to provide prescriptive recommendations back to you to improve your environment’s reliability and stability.

Aligned to Global Services offerings, VMware Skyline is initially available for Premier Support customers with Production Support customer availability coming next year. Today VMware Skyline provides increased visibility for VMware vSphere and VMware NSX environments.  Additional products will be added over time.

With minimal administration, a rigorous privacy and security policy, and transformational value, VMware Skyline is a game changer for your support experience with VMware.

Sign up today to join our Managed Access program at   https://www.vmware.com/support/services/skyline.html