Think about this: how much time do you spend reviewing the logs or coordinating with the VMware GSS team to get the support? Our GSS team members are indeed working hard 24*7 to ensure that you (our customers) get the best possible support experience. Today, when you log a case with GSS, our support teams respond to you within the defined SLAs. From raising a support ticket to getting support, the entire cycle may become a time-consuming part.
VMware introduces you to the Skyline Health diagnostics tool to enhance your support experience by providing log analysis and recommendations. These upfront recommendations provided by SHD may save your significant efforts, and it can further reduce your environment’s overall downtime.
What is VMware Skyline Health diagnostic tool?
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics for vSphere is a self-service tool to detect issues using log bundles and suggest the KB remediate the issue. vSphere administrators can use this tool for troubleshooting issues before contacting VMware Support. The tool is available to you free of cost.
What is the difference between Skyline advisor and Skyline Health Diagnostic Tool?
Skyline Advisor is web service hosted by VMware, whereas the Skyline health diagnostic tool is on-prem solution and doesn’t require you to have a cloud account. There are also differences in terms of the capabilities provided by these two products. Skyline advisor is a proactive analytics tool, whereas skyline health diagnostic is purely reactive, symptom based, focused on logs analysis and recommendations.
Benefits of having Skyline Health Diagnostic
Based on symptoms, VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics provides a Knowledge Base article or remediation steps to resolve the issue.
Self-service improves the time to get the recommendations to resolve the issue.
Quick recommendation helps to get the infrastructure back from failure and ensures that the business runs with less disruption.
Installation
The installation procedure is straightforward and can be broken into three stages, mainly
You can access SHD management UI via a web browser. Just access the FQDN or IP address of SHD VM, and it will open-up the management UI. From there, you can configure Proxy settings, CEIP, and other management settings related to SHD.
Click here to know more about the installation steps.
Upgrade
Upgrade in SHD is a fairly simple process in SHD. You can navigate to Settings-> Upgrade & History.
Tool Update
Keep VMware SHD appliance up-to-date
VCG Update
VCG update keeps the latest VMware Compatibility Guide up-to-date
How to analyse the logs?
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostic tool provides you two ways to analyse the logs.
Online
You can connect to the vCenter Server or an ESXi host directly and collect the logs. If connected to the vCenter Server, you have an option to select the inventory object, and in a single run, you can choose 32 hosts for the log analysis.
What if the vCenter Server is not online
You can select a checkbox “Connect to vCenter Appliance”, This will connect to the vCenter appliance and fetch the logs for you.
Offline
You can upload the logs manually. Logs must be “.TGZ” or “.zip” file
Once the report is generated, you can view the report in the “Show Reports” section and click on view, or you can also download the report to see the details
