Last week I presented at the Tech Support Summit in Cork with Cormac. Our session was about the evolution of vSAN, where are we today but more importantly which directly will we be going. One thing that struck me when I discussed vSAN Support Insight, the solution we announced not to long ago, is that not too many people seemed to understand the benefit. When you have vSAN and you enable CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) then you have a phone home solution for your vSphere and vSAN environment automatically. What this brings is fairly simple to explain: less frustration! Why? Well the support team will have, when you provide them your vCenter UUID, instant access to all of the metadata of your environment. What does that mean? Well the configuration for instance, the performance data, logs, health check details etc. This will allow them to instantly get a good understanding of what your environment looks like, without the need for you as a customer to upload your logs etc.
At the event I demoed the Support Insight interface, which is what the Support Team has available, and a lot of customers afterwards said: now I see the benefit of enabling this, I will do this for sure when I get back to the office. So I figured I would take the demo, do a voice over and release it to the public. We need more people to join the customer experience improvement program, so watch the video to see what this gives the support team. Note by the way that everything is anonymized, without you providing a UUID it is not possible to correlate the data to a customer. Even when you provide a UUID the support team can only see the host, vm, policy and portgroup (etc) names when you provide them with what is called an obfuscation map (key). Anyway, watch the demo and join now!
Hi Duncan, the biggest problem with CEIP which I see everyday interacting with customers about this great feature – where is documented what actually is being sent, how often, where to etc. and how can they doublecheck this?
They dont want the marketing fluff (like on https://www.vmware.com/solutions/trustvmware/ceip.html), but a real deep-down technical document including verification informations they can handover to their compliance team.
Without this (easy to find) information many of the customers I meet in both Consulting as well as Training will not get an internet connection for VC allowed for this matter.
Do you know if there is a much more detailed official document available?
Thanks!
Note: German commenting here, we may are very much sticklers for the details ;).
You can actually content yourself from vCenter server. You can find here how to do that:
https://storagehub.vmware.com/t/vmware-vsan/vsan-support-insight/export-of-ceip/
It seems not many people have been able to figure that out. I will write a short post pointing to this blog. I will see if I can find out the details around how often, how long and where.
Thanks Duncan! Yeah, I´ve seen that port on StorageHub. A bit better described and a few more details than on the CEIP page.
Would be great if that stuff could be consolidated, a little bit of info added and easy to find for customers.
If I tell them look here and there, and then on your VCSA, they are like “meh, the compliance team wont look at this, give me a doc”. Will try to push out the info as often as I can ;).
I will write an article and will ask the team to create a single page with all details
the support team is working on a single doc / kb that will hold all info you may need Steffen.
Thanks for this info. I’ve been reading on V-twin shocks