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.

• Read-only by design — and provable (v1.8.0): both MCP tools are read, none write; set VMWARE_READ_ONLY=true (or the per-skill VMWARE_DEBUG_READ_ONLY) and the family read-only gate verifies that at startup instead of taking the docs' word for it — env vars are the only switch here, this skill has no config file. See Read-Only Mode.

MCP tools

Read-Only Mode

vmware-debug is read-only by design — both MCP tools carry the [READ] marker, take no credentials, and make no network calls at all; they only correlate event dicts the calling agent has already fetched with the other skills' read tools. Since v1.8.0 that is provable rather than merely documented: set VMWARE_READ_ONLY=true and the family read-only gate enumerates the registry at startup and verifies that zero write tools are exposed — structural, not a prompt instruction a model can ignore. Off by default. Fail-closed: if the mode is requested but cannot be guaranteed, the server refuses to start rather than running open.

The same variable is family-wide: one env var also strips every write tool from the write-capable siblings (aiops, storage, vks, nsx, ...), so a whole-estate read-only posture is a single setting.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vmware-debug": {
      "command": "vmware-debug",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "VMWARE_READ_ONLY": "true"
      }
    }
  }
}

• Per-skill override: VMWARE_DEBUG_READ_ONLY beats the family-wide VMWARE_READ_ONLY. vmware-debug has no config.yaml, so the env vars are the only switch. Precedence: per-skill env → family env → off.
• Classification: this skill registers its tools through a build_server() factory, so the gate classifies from the [READ]/[WRITE] docstring marker rather than from MCP annotations. Anything not provably read-only is treated as a write.
• Startup log: nothing is logged as withheld because nothing is — the gate's empty result is the assertion (write-capable siblings log Read-only mode active ... withheld N write tool(s) instead).

License

MIT.