Announcing VMware Skyline™ Health Diagnostics 4.0

This blog was authored by Abhilash Kunhappan, VMware Technical Support Director for Skyline Health Diagnostics.

VMware Skyline™ Health Diagnostics (SHD) has transformed to a unified diagnostic utility that brings both proactive and reactive health check and diagnosis for various VMware products like vSphere (ESXi and vCenter), vSAN, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Horizon, VMware SD-WAN, with many more on the road map. Skyline Health Diagnostics (SHD) is a joint initiative between VMware Engineering and VMware Global Support to enhance your support experience. SHD minimizes downtime by managing day-2 operations with ease and enables seamless upgrades.

Here are the new features with SHD 4.0 released this week:

More than 2000+ signatures included to quickly identify the roadblocks and issues within the environment on day 2 operations. These signatures are based on top SRs reported to Global Support relating to both product and environmental issues.
Profile-based diagnostics and health checks.
VMware Horizon & SD-WAN product support from SHD 4.0.
VMware Cloud Foundation upgrade assessment.
Fully supported APIs to perform tasks on SHD.
Upgrade option with SHD 4.0.
Deploy and manage SHD via a single pane of glass.

Profile based diagnostics and health checks

Enhanced UI changes to bring a better user experience.
Create and run diagnostics and pre-checks on specific a site (vCenter, VSAN, VCF, Horizon & ESXi Hosts) and a specific environment.

Save the executed checks as profiles for later use and auto schedule the profile for weekly, monthly and yearly executions.

SHD 4.0 is now capable of manually executing the saved profiles so that the user can execute the same profile in the future.

The created profiles can be duplicated, edited with the workflow, and executed if we want to create a new profile.

VMware Horizon & SD-WAN product support with SHD 4.0

60+ Plugins added for VMware Horizon
SD-WAN is now under Tech Preview mode with offline analysis
80+ Signatures added to SD-WAN with offline analysis

VMware Cloud Foundation upgrade assessment

SHD 4.0 now has separate VCF – SDDC Manager diagnostics that can be executed against the VCF environment
SHD 4.0 now can run upgrade assessments for VMware Cloud Foundation environments supported with VCF 4.5 and later versions
The assessment engine integrated with SHD is now capable of validating and flagging ongoing current issues (product or environmental) so that the users can fix them prior to the VCF upgrade

Fully supported APIs available from SHD 4.0

APIs are now categorized by product
Upload offline log analysis from remote and local locations via API
Profile edits and creation via API
API-based upgrades on VMware compatibility database

Upgrade option with SHD 4.0

OVA should be downloaded to migrate from previous versions of SHD to SHD 4.0
Deprecation of upgrades from previous versions as SHD 4.0 is a major release

Deploy and manage SHD via a single pane of glass

From vSphere 8 U1 onwards, simply log on to the vSphere Client to deploy SHD and choose the specific vCenter from ELM mode for the deployment
vSphere Client enables management and deployment of SHD from a single pane of glass