Tag: Skyline

Just a quick update on my VMware Skyline usage. Since my last post on Skyline, it seems to have been updated. Cool!

The filters still don’t get retained if you click on an issue then go back. But, there are more filter options now – There used to be 4 categories there’s now maybe 7 which is useful for more complex environments.

On the overview page, you can now scroll past the first 15 findings. It appears you now have infinite scroll, allowing you to see all findings. This is good!

I still don’t see a way to tell when something was first discovered as a finding.

If a finding is attributed to more than 10 assets, you can now scroll and see them all rather than just the first 10 and having to guess on the names of the other assets. This is a big improvement indeed.

You can now also select to see all findings for a vCentre or cluster (for example), rather than having to select each host individually. Again, another useful improvement.

We’re starting to move towards a version 2 release. Thank’s, VMware! Please keep releasing improvements.

So, VMware have a proactive support product called Skyline. You install an appliance, the Skyline Collector, in to your environment then point it at your vCenter server(s). From there, the collector monitors your environment and uploads the details to the VMware Cloud for analysis. The results are then presented to you in a portal.

Skyline is currently on release 2.0.0.2. The portal, sadly, is not a version 2 release. Whilst it does give a reasonable overview, it doesn’t quite function as I’d expect. If you apply any filters (for example, ‘Critical’ findings for ‘Compute’), click on a finding, then click the back button on the web page, the filters are removed. A minor thing, for sure, but frustrating anyway.

The ‘Date Found’ field seems to simply show the date that it was last found rather than first found. So, if you have a lot of findings (as above) and the number increases there appears to be no real way of working out what is new.

The overview page doesn’t scroll past the first 15 findings, so you have to apply filters to see all the data. This may be OK in an environment with less than 15 findings, but after that you have to remember when each finding was made – there’s no obvious way to see this – so you can tell what is a new finding.

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