<!-- mcp-name: io.github.vmware-skills/vmware-debug -->

VMware Debug

⚠️ Work in progress — the core (event correlation engine, MCP tools, CLI) is built and tested; README, server.json, full reference docs, and packaging polish are still landing. Not yet published to PyPI.

Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware" and "vSphere" are trademarks of Broadcom. Source is publicly auditable under the MIT license.

The diagnostic brain of the VMware skill family. You bring the symptom (an error, a log dump, a slow VM); this skill runs a systematic investigation, correlates events from the other skills into one timeline, ranks root-cause hypotheses, and tells you what to check next. It is read-only — it never changes anything and never executes fixes. Remediation is routed to vmware-aiops (single op) or vmware-pilot (multi-step, gated), mirroring the vmware-harden → vmware-pilot advisor/executor split.

See skills/vmware-debug/SKILL.md for the full methodology, the event-envelope contract, and symptom routing.

MCP tools

Tool	What
incident_timeline	[READ] Correlate pre-fetched events → timeline + spikes + ranked hypotheses + next-check ideas
list_symptom_categories	[READ] List recognised symptom categories + what to check for each

Offline / Air-Gapped Install (from source)

This project uses the modern PEP 517 build system (hatchling), so there is no setup.py by design — that is expected, not a missing file. If you cloned the source and hit ERROR: File "setup.py" or "setup.cfg" not found ... editable mode currently requires a setuptools-based build, your pip is older than 21.3 and cannot do an editable (-e) install with a non-setuptools backend. Editable mode is a developer convenience, not needed to run the tool — do one of:

# From the source tree — a normal (non-editable) install builds a wheel:
pip install .              # NOT  pip install -e .

# ...or upgrade pip first, and editable works too:
pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -e .

For a truly air-gapped host, build the wheels on a connected machine and copy them over — the target then needs no network:

# On a connected machine, collect this package + its dependencies as wheels:
pip wheel . -w dist        # → dist/*.whl   (or: uv build, for just this package)

# Copy dist/ to the air-gapped host, then install offline:
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-debug

License

MIT.