Guidelines for a Successful Support Engagement

In order to get the most of your support experience with Red Hat we recommend a few different tools and practices in order to maximize our efficiency and minimize downtime.

Availability
Please make sure that you are available to work with Red Hat support at the times specified. Often Red Hat will bring in additional resources from our global network of Support and Development Engineers, Product Managers and Field Experts, so ensuring that our time is efficiently spent will help accelerate resolution.

One Issue per Support Case
In the interest of clarity and focus Red Hat requests that customers focus on a single issue to resolve per support case. If you are experiencing multiple issues then Red Hat requests that you open up one case per issue so that we can assign the right resources for each issue to each individual case.

Diagnostic Information
If Red Hat makes a request for information please ensure that you provide all information that is requested. This often means sosreports or log files from every system or node in an environment, based on the nature of your issue. If you are unsure what to provide please ask Red Hat for clarification. Having this information available in its entirely ensures that we can be focused on resolving issues, rather than spending this critical time gathering data.

Out of Date Packages
Red Hat delivers many rapidly developing products and customers benefit from running fully updated to take advantage of all the latest errata, new features and security enhancements that Red Hat provides. In order to speed case resolution and increase stability and performance in your environment, customers should maintain a fully updated environment. During the diagnostic process, Red Hat may suggest updating specific packages that are determined to be involved in an issue to eliminate a customer from experiencing a known issue and to narrow the scope of resolution. If a defect has not been root-caused nor identified as resolved within the current active minor release, Red Hat Support may request the customer to first try to reproduce the issue with the relevant package in the current active minor release. If the package in the current active minor release resolves the issue, the customer is advised to commit this package into their production environment.

Collaborative Support
Red Hat uses Bomgar as a collaborative support tool. This tool allows us to accelerate support by directly engaging, reviewing and observing behavior on a customer’s system.

Red Hat has an extensive internal network of Development Engineers that collaborate with our Support Services to resolve customer cases. We frequently request our Development Engineers to work on the support cases to make sure that the right resources are working on cases to speed resolution. If there is not active tasks to accomplish during a collaborative support session Red Hat may disengage in order to continue investigation internally.

In order to respect everyone’s time, please make sure that when we start a collaborative support session everyone is prepared to work through the specific tasks. In general, it is favorable to use collaborative support to observe an issue and directly troubleshoot.

Red Hat respects if, due to security or other concerns, a customer is not able to use collaborative support. In those instances Engineering or other internal resources may not be able to remain engaged for the entire live diagnostic troubleshooting period. However, Red Hat will continue to make all commercially reasonable efforts to resolve every issue with the information that is provided.