VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics Release Notes

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics \| 20 SEP 2024 Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics | 20 SEP 2024

Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

About VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics is VMware's Self-Service diagnostic and health platform. It helps you with the following:

Diagnose any failures or known issues and provide recommendation in the form of Knowledge Base or remediation steps
Run health checks
Understand applicability of VMware Security Advisories and related resolutions
Identify issues which might impact the update or upgrade of the product

It uses product logs, configuration information, and various other information to detect problems and provide recommendations in the form of KB articles or steps to remediate them.

A vSphere Administrator can use this tool to troubleshoot the issue before contacting the VMware Global Support Service. This platform detects and provides remediation to problems in the vSphere product line. The platform provides recommendations in the form of Knowledge Base articles or steps to remediate the issues. It can work in offline mode or a disconnected environment. It uses product logs to detect issues. vSphere Administrator can use this tool for troubleshooting, before contacting the VMware Global Support Service. Your operation staff or support engineers can save a significant amount of time to detect the problem, identifying a cause, and getting a quick resolution, for VMware vSphere, using the Skyline Health Diagnostics.

For more information, see VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics Installation, Configuration and Operations Guide.

What's New

New VMSA Signatures Added

Added 2 new VMSA signatures to enhance security coverage. This update includes 2 signature for SDDC Manager, and 1 for VC, providing improved protection against the latest vulnerabilities.

Announcements

Deprecation of HCL validation

Please note that the VCG / vSAN HCL validation features have been deprecated in the 4.0.5 release of Skyline Health Diagnostics.

Supported VMware Products and Browser Compatibility

Supported VMware vSphere Releases

VMware ESXi version 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 and Update releases, 8.0, 80 U1 and onwards
VMWare vCenter version 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 and Update releases, 8.0, 80 U1 and onwards

Supported VMware vSAN Releases

VMware vSAN version 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 and Update releases, 8.0, 80 U1 and onwards

Supported VMware Cloud Foundation Releases

VMware Cloud Foundation version 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 and 5.0

Supported VMware Horizon Releases

VMware Horizon version 7.0 and 8.0

Supported VMware SD-WAN Releases

VMware SD-WAN version 3.4, 4.0, 4.2, 4.3, 4.5, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.

Supported Browsers

Microsoft Window 10

Browser Version
Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 and later
Mozilla Firefox version 56 and later
Mozilla Firefox version 56 and later
Google Chrome version 62 and later
Microsoft Edge: 44.18362.449.0
Safari version 12.1 and later

MAC OS

Browser Version
Mozilla Firefox version 56 and later
Google Chrome version 62 and later
Safari version 12.1 and later

Feature list for version 4.0.5, Sep 2024 Release

VMware Certified remote plugin for vSphere Client

vSphere 8.0 update 1 and onwards, supports the VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics as a remote plugin.

Profile based Analysis

Simplified user experience to connect and analyse the VMware products for issues. Added capability to connect to a VMware product, detect the issues and get recommendation to remediate the issues. Select the Diagnostics or Security analysis plug-in or Health Checks. Name the profile to save the input provided and use it later. Tag the specific analysis run for a faster search in the reports afterward. Schedule the analysis to detect the issue and get report automatically. Finally, get the report of the identified issues and remediation.

Encryption of the profile data

The information in the profile can be encrypted using the encryption key feature.

Collect logs for Disconnected Hosts

The VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics provides a log collection from the disconnected hosts.

Upload and Analyze logs

Upload the logs from the VMware vCenter Server or VMware ESXi host or VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager workload domain or VMware Horizon or VMware SD-WAN and analyze the log bundle for issues. Get the report of the identified issues and remediation.

Save the analysis inputs as Profile

Save the inputs provided for the analysis like VMware product to analyse, FQDN or IP address, user credentials, tag name and notification settings as a profile. These details can be encrypted using the key to keep the information secured.

VMware Security Advisory Scanning

Scan your infrastructure to know whether deployed VMware products have any security threat and to know the version of the product that has the fix for this threat, using VMware Security Advisory recommendations. This involves lightweight data collection for analysis, without the need to collect the entire log bundle.

VMware Cloud Foundation Upgrade Assessment supported on VMware Cloud Foundation release versions 4.5 or later only

You can perform the pre-upgrade assessment for VMware Cloud Foundation version 4.5 or later versions to the latest version before performing the upgrading, to know the issues impacting the upgrade and get recommendation to remediate it.

API Support

Added APIs support so that Administrator can use them in the automation script or solution. APIs are fully documented using OpenAPI 3.0 specifications. All operations except Profile Management are supported through API.

Show Reports

See the list of the last reports, download, and view it.

Scheduler

Schedule periodic health check to monitor the health status and ensure healthy and reliable infrastructure.

Settings

Upgrade and Download History

Upgrade History: See that the last five upgrades carried out with Source, Target version, start and end time, time is taken.
Download History: See the last five download version, start and end time, time is taken.

Customer Experience Improvement Program

Enable or disable the CEIP to share the data about the success or failure of the plug-ins and usage details with VMware.
View the sample data collected.
See Internet connectivity.

User Management

You can add new users with the Operator role.
As an shd-admin, you can reset the password or update user details like the name and the email ID.

Configuration

You can now improve the performance of the analyze operation by modifying the timeout and indexer settings from Skyline Health Diagnostics user interface.
You can now change the password expiration, lockout and allowed authentication failures count by modifying the respective settings from Skyline Health Diagnostics user interface.
You can now limit the time duration of logs to analyze to the last few days from the log collection date, by using the configuration settings.

Email Notification Support

You can now receive the report of Scheduled Health Check run over email using Notification Settings. Configure notification setting with SMTP server details to use this feature.
Create distribution list by adding one or more users to get notified.
Select one or more distribution list while adding the new run with notification enabled option.

Reset Password

You can update the existing password before it expires, provide a current password and a new password.

Proxy Settings

If VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics deployment is behind the proxy, provide the proxy details to enable Internet access. You need to be connected to the Internet to download the latest signatures.

Help and Support

Tools usage: Allow you to see the data Skyline Health Diagnostics collects under the CEIP program to improve the tool, you can see the data. If you are satisfied, either you can enable the CEIP data sharing with VMware or share the report through email with VMware.

About

Product version information
Release date

Signatures Added for Detecting Issues

vCenter Server Diagnostics

vCenter server un-availability due to service failure
vCenter Services un-availability
Certificate validation including PSC, Machine, STS, and Service
Appliance space-related issues
Password expiry
vCenter server Install/Upgrade/Migrate failures - partial

ESXi Diagnostics

ESXi PSOD
ESXi storage
Hostd issues
Networking related issues
Path trashing
Storage latency
File system corruption
CPU Microcode checks that require updates
upgrade failure checks
time sync related anomalies
Host disconnect coverage – partial
Host Upgrade failure – partial

vSAN Health Checks.

VMware Cloud Foundation Health Checks, Diagnostics and VMware Security Advisor issues using SDDC Manager.

VMware Horizon Diagnostics.

VMware SD-WAN Diagnostics.

Report on VMware Security Guide

The new report layout now has a section "VMSA Finding" to provide a summary of security issues and recommendations using VMware Security Advisor.

Report on Diagnostics

The new report layout now has a section "Diagnostics Finding" to provide a summary of diagnostics problems and recommendations.

Report on Health Checks

The new report layout now has a section "Health Check Findings" to provide a summary of health issues.

Performance Improvements

The Skyline Health Diagnostics has improvements in user interface and performance optimisation.

Other Improvements

Improved error messages and display on the UI for the failed downloads from external sites.
Reports will display the summary section even if there were no findings, conveying the same.
Support to force reset the shd-admin user password.
Administrator can be extending the Administrative privileges to other users.
Thumbprint based SSL Verification for all VMware products supported for analysis and diagnostics.

Unsupported Scenarios

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics will address the following scenarios in future releases:

To collect the log bundle for disconnected encrypted ESXi hosts.
Analyse the crash dump for the encrypted ESXi hosts.
VMware vCenter Servers in enhanced linked mode.

Known Limitations

Only shd-admin can download the tools update.
Concurrent "Collect Logs & Analyze" the operation are limited to four.
The maximum number for targets (VMware ESXi hosts and VMware vCenter server) for each "Collect Logs & Analyze" operation is sixty-five (sixty-four ESXi hosts and one vCenter Server).
Uninstallation of the tool removes all historical data.
The maximum no. of reports shown is the last fifty.

Known Issues

Longer Analysis Time

The host having non-default log configurations (with respect to size and number of files) mi.ght see a longer analysis time due to the number of logs.

Workaround: None
Analyzing vCenter Server as a target might not progress beyond the Generate Log Bundle stage.

Collect Logs and Analyze --> Run Diagnostics with vCenter Server as a target might not progress beyond the Generate Log Bundle stage. The issue occurs due to the corresponding "Generate Log Bundles" task on the vCenter server is not completing.

Workaround:

(1) You can restart the Skyline Health Diagnostics appliance to cancel this pending analysis task and retry after some time.

(2) You can use the timeout setting under VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics UI --> Settings Tab -->Configuration-->Log Generation Timeout; so that you can control the time duration of log collection.
For some Internet Explorer browser versions, the header content might not be aligned properly.

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics supports the limited browsers and versions, please refer the section in release notes for supported browsers.

Workaround: None
Skyline Health Diagnostics user interface might show a generic error [Object Object]

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics user interface might show a generic error [Object Object] while downloading the online update bundle for few cases while updating from 2.5.0 to 2.5.1, user can ignore it and proceed.

Workaround: None. You can ignore it and proceed.