VMware’s Skyline product teams continue to make improvements to Skyline product portfolio, best of all, the product is Free!
You can review the Release Notes for 4.0 here and if your looking for documentation on deploying and configuring the appliance, visit VMware Docs: About VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics
You may be asking, “I already have Skyline, I deployed the collector and I access Skyline Advisor” You are correct, I like to consider SHD as another toolkit that you can run on-premises and most helpful for those “air gapped” sites and where security is strict about what goes in and out. The SHD appliance is key and helping you get a health check, troubleshooting and pro-active insights.
I’m starting this blog after a clean install of SHD. At the homepage, from Analyze >> ‘+ New Analysis’
Although there are various options such as Health Checks, Upgrade Checks & Log Analysis.
For now we will perform a ‘Direct Connect Diagnostics to the vCenter appliance
Input appliance authentication information for the vCenter and click ‘Next’
For me, I left this default
At the very end click ‘Run’ and it should then appear as a Task on generating and pulling down log bundles from the vCenter. Once completed you will find the results looking like this, next click ‘Refresh’ and the ‘Show Report’ option should become available.
The report is now available to display results, being this is vCenter was just recently deployed there is not much being called here. As you can see there is an ‘Error’ with hosts disconnecting..scroll down
You can see that the appliance parsed through the logs already and pointed out some specifics
Now report does open in another browser window, if you go back to the SHD page, you can go to Show Reports and you have an option to open it again or even download it to share out to peers or support for review.
