Announcing: New Skyline Advisor Release

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We are pleased to announce the latest release of Skyline Advisor with new features and enhancements that many customers have requested. The new release includes:

• Role-based access controls
• New Findings and Recommendations
• Date stamp for new Findings
• Consolidated Recommendations and Software Interoperability feature improvements
• Bug fixes and performance improvements

You will see these enhancements when you log into Advisor as of today.

Role-based access controls

As Skyline capabilities and customer base grow and expand, our customers require an increased level of control over how access to the service is managed. Today, we are excited to launch Role-based access controls for users of the Skyline service. In previous releases, all Skyline users within a Cloud Services Platform organization have had access to the entire suite of Skyline functionality. With the introduction of Role-based access, Cloud Services Platform Organization owners now have the ability to assign two types of roles to the members of the Cloud Services Organization with access to Skyline: Skyline Administrators and Skyline Users. Initially, Skyline Administrators will have the capabilities listed below which are not available to Skyline Users. We will continue to enhance the access control feature in the future.

Skyline Administrator privileges include:

• Ability to add or deregister Skyline Collectors within Skyline Advisor
• Email notifications regarding Collector password expiration will be available as a setting to Administrators
• Ability to opt in or opt out of the Dell SupportAssist integration feature: if the Administrator opts in, all users in the Organization will see whether the Dell hosts in their environment are being monitored by Dell SupportAssist Enterprise on the Inventory page

Skyline users with the Skyline User role will still be able to see the Collector Health status and they will continue to see the VMware products configured for each Collector. Additionally, Skyline Users will still have access to the Inventory View, Findings & Recommendations, and can continue to use Log Assist.

We are making all users Skyline Administrators by default. This will ensure that none of the existing users have restrictions on their current functionality. If you are an Organization owner, we strongly recommend that you review this access and assign roles to the users in your Organizations based on the capabilities you wish to grant them. You can learn more about assigning user roles in the User Guide.

Note that this capability is offered only to those customers who have migrated to our Cloud Services Platform. For those customers who are still accessing Skyline through My VMware, we highly encourage you to migrate to Cloud Services Platform, as support for accessing Skyline using My VMware will end starting May 1st, 2020. Learn more and get started.

New Findings and Recommendations

We added several new proactive Findings and Recommendations in these categories:

• Technical Support Trending Issues – Alert you to top issues based on our analysis of common Support Requests opened by customers
• Skyline Health for vSphere Alignment – Ensures that vSphere Findings are available in both Skyline Advisor and Skyline Health for vSphere
• VMware Security Advisories – We continue to include Security Advisories to alert you to objects that are vulnerable to known security risks

Date stamp for new Findings

We have received many customer requests to add a date field indicating when the proactive Findings were first observed in your environment. We are pleased to announce that we have added a date stamp field on the Findings & Recommendations page for every Finding. Additionally, we also highlight the date when a particular object was impacted by that issue. You can view the object impacted date by clicking on any Finding and scrolling to the impacted objects table. These dates will also appear in the CSV file if you decide to export these Findings.

Consolidated Recommendations and Software Interoperability feature improvements

Based on customer feedback, we have enhanced the Consolidated Recommendations and Software Interoperability capability that we introduced late last year. You will now see a warning icon on the page if we detect a product interoperability issue with the products monitored by Skyline within your environment.

Bug fixes and performance improvements

In addition to the new capabilities listed above, we have fixed a few minor bugs and made some performance improvements to further enhance your Skyline experience.

A note about older versions of Skyline Collector

As of February 2020 month end, Skyline Collector v2.1 and v2.2 are no longer available for new downloads. We will continue to support those versions through May 2020. We kindly request you upgrade your Collector to the latest version, if you have not already done so. If you have the “Auto Upgrade” feature enabled, your Collector will upgrade automatically.

If you have questions about any of these announcements, please post in the Skyline Community.

Make sure you’re getting maximum value from Skyline!

Check out our new Skyline “Day 2” video series to learn how to use the full breadth of Skyline features and functionality:

Creating and Managing Organizations

Managing Users and Groups

Prioritizing Remediation with the Mute Feature

Using Log Assist for Support Requests

Using Upgrade Recommendations