Contacting Red Hat Technical Support

In order to understand and resolve your support requests quickly and accurately it is important that you take the following steps before you contact a Red Hat support center.

Many Red Hat customers resolve their technical issue via Red Hat's Knowledgebase. Prior to contacting to technical support, please search Red Hat's Knowledgebase as your question or issue may already be a known case.

If you still need to contact Red Hat for support, you will need to gather information about your support entitlement and problem and have it on hand when discussing the situation with the Red Hat technical engineer.

The following steps are an example of what is required.

1. Define the Problem

Being able to articulate the problem and symptoms before contacting Red Hat support will expedite the problem solving process. It is important that you be as specific as possible in explaining a problem or question to our support engineers. It is also beneficial to explain the steps you used to reproduce the problem.

Red Hat support engineers want to be sure that they provide you with exactly the right solution. The better they understand your specific problem scenario, the better they are able to resolve it.

2. Gather Background Information:

To efficiently solve a problem, the support engineer needs to have all the relevant information about the problem. Being able to answer the following questions will help us in our efforts in resolving your issue:

• What version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are you running?
• Have you obtained the latest package from Red Hat Network?
• What steps led to the failure?
• Can the problem be recreated? If so, what steps are required?
• Have any changes been made to the system that might have triggered the issue?
• Were any messages or other diagnostic information produced? If yes, what were they?
• Were there any error number(s) or any messages received during the time of issue?

3. Gather Relevant Diagnostic Information (if possible):

It is often necessary that our support engineers analyze specific diagnostic information, such as a sysreport, dumps, traces, logs, etc., in order to resolve your problem. Please provide as much of this information as possible. It will be critical in resolving your problem.

If you are unsure as to how to gather diagnostic information, please refer to our Knowledgebase or you can contact Red Hat Technical Support.

4. Determine the Severity Level:

Red Hat Technical Support strives to respond to all customer inquiries and requests in a timely manner. When submitting an issue, you will need to assign a severity level to it based on the following table so we have an understanding of the impact a problem is having on your organization.

Severity One (Urgent)

Catastrophic production problem which may severely impact the Client's production systems, or in which Client's production systems are down or not functioning; loss of production data and no procedural work around exists. Severity 1 problem also includes issues that result in an emergency condition that cause a serious security breach.

Severity Two (High)

High-impact problem in which the Client's operation is disrupted but there is capacity to remain productive and maintain necessary business-level operations. Severity 2 problem also applies for minor security breach situations.

Severity Three (Medium)

Medium-to-low impact problem which involves partial non-critical functionality loss. One which impairs some operations but allows the Client to continue to function. This may be a minor issue with limited loss or no loss of functionality or impact to the Client's operation and issues in which there is an easy circumvention or avoidance by the end user. This includes documentation errors.

Severity Four (Low)

General usage questions, recommendations for future product enhancements or modifications and to calls that are passed to Red Hat for information purposes. There is no impact on the quality, performance or functionality of the product.

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When calling or submitting an issue to Red Hat technical support about a particular service, please have the following information ready:

• Red Hat Customer Number
• The machine type/model
• Company name
• Contact name
• Preferred means of contact (voice or email)
• Telephone number where you can be reached if request is voice
• Related product and version information
• Detailed description of the issue
• Severity of the issue in relationship to the impact of it affecting your business needs

Submit via web

You may submit your request for assistance by logging into www.redhat.com/wapps/support/. Prior to submitting issues via the Web you will need the same information as if you were placing an issue by telephone.

This capability allows you to put all the pertinent information about your problem into the ticket via the Internet without having to wait for someone to call you back. This should save you time and help with problem resolution time and ensure accuracy in error and debugging messages.

If you are submitting a Severity One issue and it is outside of normal business hours in your country then it may be prudent to follow-up with a call to your local support center referencing the problem number you received on the web. We want to ensure that your emergency call will be handled in the appropriate time frame.

Submit via phone

Red Hat telephone support is available for most Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms. Red Hat provides telephone number per region or country (where available). You can access your Red Hat Technical Support phone number after you log into www.redhat.com/wapps/support/. You will be required to provide your Red Hat Customer Number for validation of the support service to which you are entitled to as well as the product about which you are calling.

After Hours Support

During After Hours we will use commercially reasonable efforts to respond, by telephone, within one hour to service calls which you specify to be Severity 1 (Urgent) problems. Normal country business hours are defined by the prevailing business hours within your country, (e.g. 9:00am to 9:00pm EST in North America or 9:00am to 5:00pm in Asia and Europe, Monday through Friday, except national holidays.)

After Hours are defined as all other hours outside of standard country business hours. An appropriately skilled support engineer from your site must be available to work with Red Hat's technical support staff during the entire time we are performing support services outside of normal country business hours.

We recommend using phone support for critical after hours problems to ensure they are responded to promptly.

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You may submit your issue by logging into www.redhat.com/wapps/support/ or by contacting Red Hat directly by telephone. These requests are logged into the Red Hat issue tracking system.

Once logged, a unique issue number is created and the issue is routed to a Red Hat Support Engineer. Please make note of this issue number and use it in any future reference on this issue.

Your Red Hat Support Engineer will research and escalate your issue as needed to resolve your problem as quickly as possible. Due to the level of specialization required to maintain superior technical expertise, it is sometimes necessary to involve more than one support team in resolving a particular software problem. This is easily handled, as our support teams are all networked together and work as one to resolve whatever problems or tickets arise.

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If at any point in our service delivery process, your expectations are not met by Red Hat, you may call our attention to this problem by asking to speak with a Global Support Services Manager or by calling your customer service executive or branch office field manager. An escalation will receive prompt attention and management focus. Red Hat Global Support Services is committed to ensuring your expectations are met and that your request is being handled appropriately.

Reopening An Incident

If the recommendations that we provide to resolve your problem fail to satisfy your requirements you may reopen the ticket number by calling your local support center and referencing the original Incident number.

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