VMware has one product that many people have not heard of & not using it. Yes, we are talking about the VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics appliance. This appliance performs the analysis of your vSphere Infrastructure & detects the problems. In this post, we will learn what VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics is & in future posts, we will see how you can deploy it in your vSphere environment & take advantage of it.
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics is a self-service diagnostics platform. It helps to detect and provide remediation to issues in the vSphere and vSAN product line. It provides recommendations in the form of a Knowledge Base article or procedure to remediate issues. It uses the log files of these products to detect issues. vSphere administrators can use this tool to troubleshoot issues before contacting VMware Support.
Below you can see the detailed architecture of VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics:
Image Credit – VMware Documentation.As you can see from above image on How this appliance places in your vSphere environment & how it collects the information then analyze it to detect the problems. It uses multiple sources such as Skyline Health Diagnostics update server, VMware Compatibility Guide & VMware Analytics Cloud Telemetry data to collect the information in order to detect & find issues in your vSphere.
Key Advantages of VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics Appliance:
- Provides Summary of VMware Security Advisory & Diagnostics
- 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/remediation helps to get the infrastructure back from failure and ensures that the business runs with a less disruption.
So how VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics works:
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics gets deployed as an OVA Appliance on vSphere. After deployment you can run diagnostics as an proactive checks or whenever you experience the issues you can export logs and run the analysis. It uses signatures to detect the issue. When a signature matches the information in log files, you are notified. You can update the signatures in appliance for latest findings.
The CEIP program collects information if the plugins ran successfully or failed. It sends this data to VMware cloud to improve the issue detection capability.
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics supports below solutions for detection & analysis:
- vSphere Analysis
- Upgrade Precheck(vCenter)
- vSAN-Health Check
- VMware Cloud Foundation
Below you can see the sample image of the Analysis report generated:
As you can see from above image it will check the ESXi host against the VMware HCL(Hardware Compatibility list) and it will display the validation with the status whether it is supported or not. It will also give you the link to download the newer version of drivers or any KB articles for the remediation.
You can also use this appliance to perform proactive analysis of your vSphere ESXi hosts so that you can make sure everything is up to date in your environment.
VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics comes as an OVA appliance that you can easily deploy in your vCenter Server.
Checkout our posts on VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics:
How to Deploy VMware Skyline Appliance Step by Step ?
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