Program Overview

Under VMware’s Service Usage Data Program VMware collects information about our customer’s use of such hosted services for the purposes set forth below, such as to improve VMware products and services, and advise our customers on how best to deploy and use our products and services.  Some VMware hosted services have established their own data collection practices and do not participate in the Service Usage Data Program.  The data collected through this Service Usage Data Program (“SUDP”) is separate from the configuration, performance, usage, and consumption data that we collect and use to facilitate delivery of our products and services (such as tracking entitlements, providing infrastructure related support, monitoring the performance, integrity and stability of the infrastructure, and preventing or addressing service or technical issues).

Types of Service Usage Data collected

As part of the Service Usage Data Program, VMware regularly collects the following information in connection with our customer’s use of our services. 

• Configuration Data: Technical data about how a customer organization has configured VMware services and related environment information. Examples include service environment information, service settings, third party applications and third party systems used in connection with the services.


• Feature Usage Data: Feature usage data relates to how a customer organization uses VMware services. Examples include details about which service features a customer uses and metrics of user interface activity.


• Performance Data: Performance data relates to how the services are performing. Examples include metrics of the performance and scale of the services, response times for user interfaces, and details about customer API calls.


• Service Logs: Service logs are automatically generated by the services. Typically, logs record system events and state during service operations in a semi-structured or unstructured form.


• Support Data: Support data relates to information that has been provided by a customer to VMware via support facilities such as chat and service support tickets.


• Survey Data: Survey data relates to a customer's Net Provider Score ("NPS") and other similar in-service surveys in relation to a customer’s use of the relevant services.

Such information is collected in association with customer identifying information via a variety of automated means (such as clickstream or similar technologies). Limited personal data (e.g. data that identifies an individual) is also collected such as email address, IP/MAC address of the device they are using, and any identifiers (including cookies). Typically, this personal data only identifies the Customer IT administrator who operates the service for a customer.  Customers should not enter personal data or sensitive personal data (or any other information that may allow an individual to be identified) when naming systems such as their hosts, VMs, or dashboards.  To the extent we collect personal data, we will process it in accordance with our Privacy and Service Notices. 

Uses of Data

The data VMware collects via the services under the Service Usage Data Program is used for the following purposes:

• Recommendations – VMware uses information to make recommendations to our customers regarding how best to use the services, such as:
  • To improve the health of the service;
  • To provide customers with their usage metrics, benchmarked against the aggregate usage metrics for other groups of customers (e.g. for a specific industry vertical).
   
• Service Improvement – VMware uses information to improve the services we offer to our customers such as:
  • To detect and fix bugs in the services and understand service improvement opportunities.
  • To help prioritize future service roadmap features.
  • To analyse use of services and features across the customer base.
  • To improve support request resolution.
  • To prioritize the order in which certain configurations or features of the service should be tested and deployed.
  • To improve the service based on usage patterns across on-premise and hosted offerings (e.g. comparison of the same components’ performance and errors on-premise versus hosted offerings for best practices implementation).
  • To improve capacity forecasting for the service.
  • To make pricing and packaging decisions (e.g. add/modify SKUs based on usage patterns).
  • To conduct testing of service features.
   
• Customer Insights – VMware uses information to better understand how our customers use VMware services, such as:
  • To understand the financial impact of the Net Provider Score and usage behaviors.
  • To create a 360 view of the customer across sales/marketing/support/usage and create enriched customer profiles for a better understanding of the customer in order to provide improved customer engagement, and to analyse customer interactions with VMware.
  • To create advanced analytical models and business intelligence reports and dashboards to generate insights for VMware at a customer or service level (and not at an individual user level).
  • To benchmark or assess the service across customers and specific customer industries.
   
• Customer Support – VMware uses information to provide proactive and reactive support to our customers regarding their use of the services such as:
  • To provide support recommendations to customers to improve the general health of the customer’s use of the service.
  • To understand a customer’s service configuration, events and issues in order to resolve a specific support request.
  • To understand a customer’s service configuration, events and issues in order to improve how VMware support resolves an issue.
  • To help customers use VMware services and offerings in more effective ways.
   
• Marketing & Sales – VMware uses information to let our existing customers know about additional services that may be of relevance to them and to inform sales conversations.

We may combine the data we collect under this Service Usage Data Program with data that we have collected about our customers in connection with a customer’s account and other VMware data collection programs (subject to any usage limitations on combining imposed by those programs). In some services you may have the ability to configure what information you provide to VMware under the Service Usage Data Program.

VMware may update this information from time to time to reflect changes in our Service Usage Data Program and our data collection and use practices.  We encourage you to periodically review this web page to keep informed.