This blog was authored by Abhilash Kunhappan, VMware Technical Support Director for Skyline Health Diagnostics.
When managing day 2+ operations of complex multi-cloud environments and mission critical data center workloads, there are three main factors that should be considered:
Faster resolution of issues and outages to minimize downtime.
Elevated data privacy to protect the environment.
Proactive health checks to identify potential issues and suggest remediation.
Having an effective tool to help address the above challenges is exactly what customers need.
VMware offers VMware Skyline™ Health Diagnostics (SHD), a joint initiative between VMware Engineering and VMware Global Support Services to enhance your support experience. This tool is absolutely free for customers and partners and facilitates a healthy and high-performing VMware environment.
Faster Resolution and Minimal Downtime
Skyline Health Diagnostics helps you automate log analysis and provide recommendations on VMware security advisory updates, compatibility checks, and driver updates. The tool can identify issues with 1800+ signatures in its inventory and is regularly updated to recognize new issues diagnosed by VMware Global Support Services. Log analysis and recommendation happens within a few minutes thus enabling faster resolution and minimal downtime during outages.
Elevated Data Privacy
Skyline Health Diagnostics can be used in a completely offline mode in an isolated environment and is still capable of running all the diagnostic plugins, health checks, Security Advisory checks, and compatibility checks. The tool will also clean up the log files after diagnostic checks. Offline mode allows customers to maintain maximum data privacy.
Proactive Health Checks
Skyline Health Diagnostics helps assess vCenter, ESXi, and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments with pre-checks and recommendation reports, thus enabling smoother upgrade cycles and optimally using the allocated maintenance window for upgrades and avoiding unforeseen surprises.
What is the difference between Skyline Health Diagnostics and Skyline Advisor?
Skyline Health Diagnostics
Skyline Health Diagnostics is a predominantly reactive, symptom-based diagnostic tool, focused on log analysis and Knowledge Base article recommendations, including proactive, scheduled health checks. This tool is deployed as a virtual appliance within the vSphere environment. SHD can help detect and provide remediation to issues in vSphere, vSAN, VCF, and EUC environments. Skyline Health Diagnostics can fully diagnose without external network connectivity (offline mode), thus helping dark site or otherwise isolated environments. Current features include:
Enable SHD plugin on vSphere Client.
Use SHD in a single pane simply by logging on to the vSphere Client.
Remote Log bundle upload, highly useful for isolated environments.
Connect, collect log bundles, and perform diagnostics.
SHD helps schedule vCenter and VCF prechecks by using the prechecks prior to upgrades of the vCenter and VMware Cloud Foundation environments to enable smoother upgrades and proactively address issues.
Skyline Advisor
Skyline Advisor is a self-service web application that enables you to receive proactive intelligence with new insights, accelerated health analysis, and simplified design, within a web browser. Skyline Advisor is available to customers who have installed and configured the Skyline Collector. Customers use Skyline Advisor to view account details, inventory details, findings discovered by VMware Skyline, proactive recommendations, download Operational Summary Reports (OSR), and transfer support bundles using Skyline Log Assist.
