Identifying Problems And Communicating With Support

Symptom

Some customers are contacting R1soft for answers to questions that might be answered by certain features already included in the R1soft product.

Cause

New customers are not aware of the features and their uses, and the issues they generate are getting lost in the communication process.

Resolution

This article is designed to point out some of the more useful features of the productand their uses, and to give advice on how to improve communication when a support ticket needs to be generated.

The data needed to resolve any problem starts with a specific description, a location, a time and the scope of these three areas.

1. One of the most common problems customers ask results from the CDP and Agent not communicating. A common source of this symptom is a firewall or selinux interfering with the traffic between systems. A feature of the CDP Serverinterface that might reveal this problem is the "History" and "Logs" combination. Starting on the "Hosts" page (reached by clicking the "Hosts" button at the top left of your interface), results in a list of hosts serviced by the CDP Server.

Now, clicking the "History" button four places to the right will display a similar list, but the filter bar will be different. For instance, the leftmost drop-down box on the filter bar allows you to select a time frame. If you have a problem that has only occurred, say, in the last 12 hours, using this filter may reveal the scope of the problem during this time. The icons to the left of each event line can be sorted by clicking the label "State" at the top of the hostdisplay. Then, looking at the host names directly to the right, you may see how many Agent-based hosts failed during this time period. Clicking anywhere on the event line EXCEPT THE HOST NAME will reveal the messages for that particular event in the lower part of the display. These messages can be further filtered by the choices made in the "Log Message Filter" drop down box. If there are a lot of messages, filtering out the warnings might simplify the analysis of the problem. A message containing, "Cannot connect to Host", coupled with an agent message that adding the key to the Agent failed (from the Agent side), would indicate that the two systems are not communicating and narrow the process somewhat.

Sometimes the problem only occurs during a specific process. The filter with the default label "All Types" will allow you to further narrow the scope of the problem.

2. Some problems have occurred with issue notification. If narrowing down the scope of the problem doesn't enable the customer to solve the problem, the logs, messages and information about the specific problem, location, timing and scope should be included in the ticket generated at our website. Clear communication between the administrator and our support staff enable us to resolve the issue more quickly. Unfortunately, many of our customers are losing our response e-mails in their spam filters. Please, check your spam filter and add support@r1soft.com to your whitelist.

Also, we have an option in the ticket system to subscribe to an RSS feed, making it easier for the customer to become aware of changes in the ticket status. Customers can view the tickets over the web at support.r1soft.com . After logging in, the customer is presented with a menu that allows him/her to see all issues, unresolved issues, or resolved issues.

To subscribe to the RSS feed, notice the menu item toward the top menu line called "RSS" with links to "issues" and "comments". Clicking on "issues" takes the viewer to a formated article on the issue. At the bottom of the page description (the first major paragraph) is a link that allows the viewer to subscribe to the RSS feed, which means that any changes to the status of the issue will automatically be sent to the customer.

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