Introduction - what is a Proactive Case?

Proactive cases are a way for Managed Service customers to provide advance notice to Red Hat Support of planned upgrades, migrations, patching, or any other maintenance activities. Typically, these events happen outside regular business hours.
Having prior knowledge of the planned activity provides Red Hat with an opportunity to ensure the right information is made available to better prepare technical support should you encounter an issue.

Note [1]: New installations do not qualify for a Proactive Case, as they do not align with the Severity Level Definitions for Severity 1. For issues encountered during new installations, please open a regular Support Case.

Note [2]: Red Hat support will not join any maintenance window communications, but will set the severity to 1 at the start of the maintenance window and will be actively checking for any updates on the proactive case during the maintenance window.

Prerequisites

• Proactive Cases should be submitted at least 7 to 14 days before the scheduled activity is due to begin. This is to allow Red Hat time to assign a support person to your case and provide them with adequate time to become familiar with the maintenance activity and ask any follow-up questions before the maintenance window begins. Shorter time frames are accepted, but they will result in less preparation time being available, which could lead to delays in Red Hat responding to an issue in your proactive case.
• To allow Red Hat to allocate the most appropriate engineer from their global support team, and to ensure no delays due to translation, all Proactive Support Cases are conducted in English.
• Customers are expected to be familiar with the Reference Guide for Engaging with Red Hat Support article, which provides best practices for engaging Red Hat Support.
• Prepare and provide all details requested below at least 7 days prior to the event.
• Where applicable, engage your Technical Account Manager (TAM), Solution Architect (SA), or Customer Success Manager (CSM).

Opening a Proactive Support Case

Open a normal Support Case and complete the following fields:

• Account: - As normal
• Owner: - Who will be the contact available during the maintenance window
• What can we help you with?: - Select Other
• Summary: - Prefix "[Proactive]" and then provide a brief description of the maintenance.

• Product: - Chose the product: Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO)

• What are you experiencing? What are you expecting to happen?: - Add the following details:

  • resourceID - Refer to these instructions on How to get resourceID?.
  • Date / Time of Event - Provide the planned "start date/time" and "the end date/time** of the maintenance window in both local and UTC time zones.

  • Maintenance Description - provide as many details as possible, for example:

    • Specific activities occurring during the event
    • Environment (PROD/UAT/NONPROD/etc)
    • Additional system(s) involved (are other systems being upgraded at the same time; Network/Firewall/DNS/.. changes occurring at the same time; LDAP/IDP; ...;)
    • Other components being upgraded (for example operators)
    • Any other relevant information

  • Contact Information - provide the primary and secondary contact names, email addresses and phone numbers with country and region code. This is especially important if the person who opened the case is not the person doing the maintenance activity.

• Support Level: - Premium

• Severity - select Severity level 3 (Normal). When the maintenance window begins, the Severity level will be raised to 1 (Urgent) by Red Hat engineers to ensure a timely response to any questions or issues that arise during the maintenance window.

• Send notifications - Additional people you would like to receive notifications for this proactive case.

• Upload Files to analyze - Upload a must-gather of the cluster. Instructions on how, can be found here

• HIGHLIGHT: For ARO clusters is important to provide the resourceID of the cluster.

  • resourceID - Refer to these instructions on How to get resourceID?.