VMware Skyline Advisor 1.0 Hands on Experience

VMware Skyline Advisor is a self-service web portal that allows you to access proactive findings and recommendations from VMware Skyline at your convenience. I previously, posted an article about the initial release of VMware Skyline and you can find it here. It’s obvious that there are more improvements comparatively the previous releases and it has the self-service portal which can be accessed by the customer.

In the previous release, it was totally depend on the Premier Service engineer and he was sending out the OSR in each week. But with this release of VMware Skyline Advisor you can see the previous OSRs and report is downloadable whenever you need. 

Skyline Advisor provides you with access to:

• Real-time dashboards
• Proactive recommendations from VMware’s library of knowledge
• Suggested upgrades to prevent potential issues.

Premier Services customers have additional Skyline Advisor features available to them, including the ability to access and download Operational Summary Reports (OSRs) that reveal more advanced findings and recommendations, as well as custom OSRs generated by VMware Technical Support Engineers.

You will be getting an email when the OSR is readily available to download along with a link to the VMware Skyline Advisor self-service portal. 

The given link will redirect you to the VMware Skyline Advisor otherwise you can access the Skyline portal via this link: https://skyline.vmware.com/advisor/

Your my VMware credentials are required to access the portal

VMware Skyline Advisor Home Page

Then You will be redirecting to the VMware Skyline Advisor Home page which has a small introduction video about the product 

The Skyline Advisor Home page provides you the following information: 

• My VMware account 
• Company name 
• Account ID 
• Support Entitlement Level 

VMware Skyline Advisor Account Details Page

The Skyline Advisor Account Details page provides you the following information:

• Account ID 

• Number of registered Skyline Collectors. 

• Total number of vCenter Servers added to VMware Skyline.

• Total number of ESXi Hosts added to VMware Skyline.

• Total number of Virtual Machines added to VMware Skyline.

• The amount of time lapsed since product usage data was analysed by VMware Skyline, for the purposes of updating proactive findings and recommendations. 

• The time when product usage data will be analysed next by VMware Skyline, for the purposes of updating proactive findings and recommendations. 

• All Skyline Collectors configured within the customer’s environment, including Collector ID, Collector Name, Version, Status and Last Activity. 

• Expanding each Skyline Collector within the Account Details page displays each vCenter Server and/or NSX Manager added to that particular Skyline Collector. Expanding the vCenter Server or NSX Manager displays inventory details. 

Sorry, If the added information is not clear Image is too wider, Please open up this image in another tab

VMware Skyline Collector information also can be seen after click on the version 

Proactive Findings Tab

Under Proactive Findings tab you can see a great view of information about your datacenter and the severity of the identified issues, actually as a customer we were waiting to see something like this and it is available with this release. A great improvement of the product. 

The Skyline Advisor Proactive Findings page provides you the following information:

• A breakdown of number of proactive findings, based on the level of severity. Severity levels include Critical, Moderate, and Trivial. 

• A breakdown of number of proactive findings, based on the category. Categories include Compute, Network, Security, and Storage. 

• Each proactive finding is displayed, either in card view (default) or list view. Clicking a proactive finding displays more detail about the finding, including: ​

  • Finding ID: A unique ID that can be used to ask questions and search for more information related to that particular finding.

  • Date Found: When the finding was discovered within the customer’s environment. 

  • Severity: Critical, Moderate, or Trivial. 

  • Description: Provides information on the potential issue discovered within the customer’s environment. 

  • Recommendations: Provides information on how to remediate the potential issue within the customer’s environment. Recommendations can reference a VMware Knowledge Base article, Best Practice, Security Advisory, or other official VMware article, document, or whitepaper. 

  • Affected Objects: The individual objects that could be impacted by the potential issue. Customer’s can view the affected objects either within the same page, or export the affected objects to a CSV file for use in configuration management tools. A Search bar provides the ability to search for a particular object within the proactive finding.   

Search and Filter capabilities are available. This includes the ability to search for a specific proactive finding or description, or filter proactive findings based upon severity level, category or source/object name

Proactive Findings can be exported to a CSV 

Filtering capabilities according to the severity, category and the Source name

OSR Library

The Skyline Advisor OSR Library page is available only to Premier Services customers. Production Support customers will access all of their proactive findings within the Skyline Advisor Proactive Findings page. Operational Summary Reports will continue to be generated for Premier Services customers. These Operational Summary Reports will contain advanced proactive findings only, which may require additional troubleshooting or assistance from a Premier Services Technical Support Engineer.  

The Skyline Advisor OSR Library page provides you the following information:

• Operational Summary Report Name. 

• The Operational Summary Report created date. 

• The Operational Summary Report type, either standard or custom.

• Standard Operational Summary Reports are automatically created by VMware Skyline. They are created on a scheduled basis and automatically populated within the OSR Library. 

• Custom Operational Summary Reports are created by the Premier Services Support Account Manager (SAM), Support Account Engineer (SAE), or other customer-supporting role. An example of a custom Operational Summary Report could include all Critical severity proactive findings, within the Network category. 

• The ability to Download Operational Summary Reports (OSR).   

Filter capabilities are available. Customers can filter available Operational Summary Reports based upon date created, and report type (standard / custom).

Great article Aruna, thank you for sharing. If you ever have any questions about VMware Skyline, please let us know.

— VMware Support Experience (@VMwareCSE) October 22, 2018

Article Short Link: https://tcrum.net/SkylineAdvisor

If you found this post as useful please rate the post and share it!