Enhanced Support Experience with Faster Resolution: VMware Skyline Health Diagnostic

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostic (SHD) is a self-service on-premises tool that deeply analyses the logs to detect an issue. After detecting an issue, SHD recommends appropriate VMware Knowledge Base (KB) articles for the remedial steps. By doing so, the overall troubleshooting process is fastened, and resolution time is significantly reduced.

Introduction

Why VMware SHD?

We live in an imperfect world, and our VMware-based infrastructure is no exception. We all can agree that troubleshooting an issue sometimes can be a bit tricky , frustrating and time consuming. The delay in identifying, root causing and remediating issues can impact the availability of your infrastructure. While VMware Global Support Services (GSS) works round the clock to provide world-class tech support, the inherent nature of the support process and troubleshooting can sometimes lead to an increased resolution time.

To understand SHD, let us first look at an issue lifecycle:

In the above-mentioned overall flow, customers can save a lot of time if the problem can be resolved during initial troubleshooting itself, and this is what SHD precisely does.

SHD is equipped with a comprehensive database of plugins. Plugins are an inbuilt set of signatures that SHD searches in the log bundle to identify any problem and recommend the associated KB article.

Customers can use VMware SHD in the following two ways:

Connect directly to the problematic vCenter Server or ESXi to extract the logs.
Upload the logs manually to the SHD

SHD uses Secure Shell (SSH) to extract logs from a disconnected host.

Current release of SHD( v2.5.0) supports vSphere, vSAN and VCF.

VMware Security Advisory (VMSA)

A VMSA scan accompanies log analysis to detect and report any security vulnerabilities in the environment. VMSA scan findings inform our customers about any possible security vulnerabilities to be fixed/patched immediately.

SHD Under the Hood

SHD shares its DNA with VMware GSS. VMware GSS regularly publishes new KB articles and updates existing KB articles with new findings. Over the years, GSS has built an enormous knowledge library that helps tech-support engineers identify and resolve issues.

With SHD, we are sharing this knowledge library with our customers. SHD is also equipped with advanced troubleshooting tools that our engineering uses to troubleshoot complicated problems.

Post log analysis, SHD uses the inbuilt logic to categorize issues under:

Informative
Warning
Errors

Customers can view these categories and take necessary actions as per the issue severity.

A Few other Benefits of SHD:

Does not require internet connectivity.

We understand how critical data privacy is for our customers. With SHD, customers can be assured that their data never leave the premise. SHD is capable of working in dark sites. For dark sides, VMware provides an offline bundle that customers can use to upgrade SHD.

It's FREE !!

SHD does not have any licensing costs. Any Customer with a valid my.vmware.com user-id can download it free of charge.

SHD Deployment

SHD is an on-premises solution. It can either be deployed as an OVA or can be installed from an iso image. To install SHD from an iso image, a VMware Photon OS-based VM is required. To know more about VMware Photon, please refer to this document.

Conclusion

At VMware, customer experience is paramount, and we always strive towards delivering innovative solutions that can make our customer’s lives easy. VMware Skyline Health Diagnostic empowers and enables our customers to troubleshoot and resolve issues rapidly. With faster resolution time, our customers can improve the overall infrastructure availability and ensure that their businesses always deliver high performance.