Best practices for engaging with Red Hat Support

With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

Red Hat Support can both solve issues and help with updates, upgrades or patching. If you have the appropriate subscriptions, we can help you if you create a proactive case. Our requirement is having the proactive case created at least seven days in advance and providing the procedure that will be done in your update or patching. You can find what Red Hat production support includes here.

Before opening a case, check to see if you can find an answer to your question using the Solution Engine. This tool is designed to streamline access to the correct information so you can resolve system problems quickly and efficiently. If you encounter an issue that you cannot resolve using the Red Hat Customer Portal, you can open a support case online or by calling your region’s technical support hotline. To help minimize impact to your business, I recommend opening a support case as soon as you discover an issue.

If you have a Technical Account Manager, they will engage on your cases to help coordinate resources, enlist specialist help, and advocate for your needs to help you get you a speedy resolution.

The following figure describes our process for the Knowledge Customer Solutions.

Creating a case

In order for us to efficiently identify your problem, we ask you to provide as much information as possible when creating a ticket. The more detail you give in the case explaining your configuration, environment, etc., the easier it can be to find a solution. Our recommendation is to write the case in English because it is the common language to work across multiple regions. That does not mean that we do not accept other languages, but English can speed up the resolution of the case. If required, we can escalate your case or offer 24x7 support.

A dedicated support engineer (Enhanced Support) or a Technical Account Manager (TAM) can increase the speed to resolution because you have an assigned technical expert who has profound existing knowledge of your environment.

The creation of the case via web/online can also help us to suggest different articles or solutions applied in previous cases or other clients with the same issue as you in order to speed resolution.

You will fill in the account number and your username. It is important that you do not use global accounts in case we have to contact you by phone or ask for additional information. This helps us not lose track of the case and avoid the clients abandoning the case. The terms of the use for Red Hat Support indicate that each person must have an individual account.

You will be asked for the product name and version of the involved software. The description of the problem should be as accurate as possible so that the search engines can suggest articles or solutions to help you solve the problem. It is advisable to read the suggested solutions (KCS) before proceeding with the creation of the case.

The use of keywords is important in the creation of cases, as it helps the intelligent search engines supply helpful knowledge database documents and even assigns you directly to the expert of the component or service which you have problems with. To do this, I recommend specifying the name of the component which has the problem such as [Ceph] or [Nova].

Customers with several regions or datacenters can indicate the affected site or region and then track their organization’s support history.

For example [Component] [Region] Problem description  

Again, please always try to give as much information about the problem, the commands used and the design of your platform or environment. The image below shows an example:

Also, remember that in order for us to assign the correct priority, it is important to indicate if the affected platform is pre-production, QA, development or production. For this, you have to select the severity of the problem.  

To make faster progress with a case, attach the sosreports for the affected servers. A technical support engineer will review the logs from the sosreport to gain a better understanding.

How to create a sosreport: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3592

For each product you can provide additional logs like the examples below:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  • sosreport

  • Information Relevant to Platform Cases

• Red Hat Virtualization

  • rhevm logcollector

• Red Hat Satellite 5

  • spacewalk-debug

• Red Hat Satellite 6 - Foreman

  • foreman-debug

• Red Hat JBoss Middleware

  • jdr

  • Information Relevant to Middleware Cases

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform

  • Collect All applicable logs

• Red Hat Ceph Storage

  • Information to collect while debugging/opening a Red Hat Ceph case

• Red Hat Gluster Storage

  • Specific debug data that needs to be collected for GlusterFS components to help troubleshoot ing

If your files are larger than 1 GB, you can use our FTP.

Select and attach the sosreport and add support level:

You can read the definitions of severity at the following link. Please remember that non-production systems cannot have severities 1 or 2 (https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/severity/).

You can also add other users of your team or a distribution list to the email notification, so they can receive any comments on the case. There is an option to enable the email notifications for new cases or any comments made in your account.

Another useful option is to create case groups. You can create these groups and add the specialists or managers who will work on the cases. For example: if you have IaaS or PaaS or operating systems groups, you can select a case group to notify other members, for example, cloud.

Having all this information, you are ready to send the case to Red Hat Support.

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

https://access.redhat.com/gdpr

Data privacy and security are top of mind of many of our customers. Red Hat has implemented a data protection program and processes to comply with the EU regulation. The information provided in the above link is intended to support you through your data protection and privacy journey, and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice.

The Red Hat Privacy Policy has been updated in accordance with the GDPR and can be viewed here.

Customer questions about Red Hat’s GDPR compliance program can be sent to trust@redhat.com.

Collaboration between partners

Red Hat collaborates with different manufacturers and suppliers to solve problems. We use

the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet). It is a third-party, not-for-profit member organization for IT vendors and exists to facilitate multi-vendor collaboration on customer issues.

Red Hat and many providers use the TSANet platform to work together. Almost all major technology providers are included with different categories or levels of support. For the benefit of the customer, it should be recommended that the provider is registered using the Premium level of support for 24x7 support and to receive calls from other associate members to TSANet.

Ongoing projects

Red Hat is currently collaborating on the project Citellus, an open source project that aims to help validate the system configuration or any sosreport obtained from them. Running plugins, you can check the system status based on those findings and report the results of each, helping to detect current or future problems. We are happy to receive your contribution to Citellus!

For more information about how we support you the open source way, check out our Customer Portal blog post.

Edu Alcañiz is Cloud Success Architect in EMEA. He has worked with many enterprise customers on complex cloud environments. He has approximately 10 years experience in cloud systems and joined Red Hat in 2015. Previously, he worked as TAM in EMEA for two years.

A Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a specialized product expert who works collaboratively with IT organizations to strategically plan for successful deployments and help realize optimal performance and growth. The TAM is part of Red Hat’s world-class Customer Experience and Engagement organization and provides proactive advice and guidance to help you identify and address potential problems before they occur. Should a problem arise, your TAM will own the issue and engage the best resources to resolve it as quickly as possible with minimal disruption to your business.

Connect with TAMs at a Red Hat Convergence event near you! Red Hat Convergence is a free, invitation-only event offering technical users an opportunity to deepen their Red Hat product knowledge and discover new ways to apply open source technology to meet their business goals. These events travel to cities around the world to provide you with a convenient, local one-day experience to learn and connect with Red Hat experts and industry peers.