The number of tools available for proactive insight into your vSphere environment continue to expand. When someone nowadays says ‘Skyline’, well which component? I will begin by reviewing some of the various Skyline options and then will follow with the actual plugin-in installation.
Skyline Collector Appliance – On premise Photon appliances which runs in a customers private data center and responsible for the collection of data and logs to send to VMware Cloud. Click here to learn more
Skyline Advisor – VMware’s cloud offering in VMware’s Cloud. This is what ties into the Skyline Collector appliances referenced above.
Skyline Health Diagnostics – This is an appliance ran in your private datacenter to perform healthy checks against your vCenter appliance and vSphere environment. This is a handy tool to check for plugins, interoperability checks and upgrade preparedness.
Skyline Health Diagnostics vCenter Plugin – Appliance deployed which integrates with vSphere. This is a new feature starting in vCenter 8.0 U1 & later. Review the following VMware documentation. Registration of Plug-in from vSphere Client 8.0 U1 and onwards.
Integrated vSphere Skyline – Inside vSphere at vCenter >> Monitor >> Skyline Health or vSAN Cluster >> Monitor >> vSAN >> Skyline Health there are various checks within.


In the home lab I already have Skyline Health Diagnostics deployed, when logging into it, there is a section for a vCenter Plugin Registration.

Click ‘+’ and authenticate with SSO credentials to the vCenter.

Once you click ‘Submit’, go into vSphere and you will find the solution successfully installed, you should also see the following banner.

After you Refresh the browser, you should now have an interactive solution within vSphere and you can kick off health checks and diagnostics straight out of vSphere.
