Overview

Zadara Support receive many many tickets throughout the year, ranging from staff working in large Enterprise size companies and their dedicated Cloud or Storage Staff to smaller companies with several staff each covering multiple job roles.

In order to give the best possible experience and the quickest resolution here are the points and details that our Support teams need customers to provide when raising a support request especially when sending us  an email request.

Providing this information in the initial request will help us to quickly triage a request, begin analysis, escalate to the relevant teams, and reach a quicker resolution.

Required Information

Please see a list of expected items we need customers to provide in any Support Request.

For Zadara Compute requests:

• Your Identity
• All relevant zCompute resource IDs
• Description of the Issue or Problem itself

For Zadara Storage requests:

• Your Identity
• Cloud name
• Storage Instance name/ID (alternatively the end-point for the issue Command Centre or Provisioning portal )
• Storage Entity name(s)/ID(s) (Drives, RAID Groups, Pools, Volumes, etc)
  
• Description of the Issue or Problem itself

Note: Please never send sensitive information such as password details, secrets, private keys in a Support Request. 

For more information on the type of information we require and where you can retrieve these details from your Zadara Compute and Storage products, see the sections below.

Identity

In order to ensure that you have the necessary authorisation to make a request, our support team needs to know who you are.

We can usually determine this from a senders personal email address, but not always. Sometimes a group email is in use and we therefore need to ask for more specific details to ensure that you have the relevant authority to make a support request. 

You can avoid this delay by providing that information upfront. Also, where you are acting as a third party company providing IT support for an end-user it is helpful to provide that detail again so we can ensure you have valid support access.

Zadara Compute Resources

In order to ensure that our team can identify the correct resources relevant to your Zadara Compute support request, we require you to supply the ID(s) of all the resource(s) in question.

IDs can be found on within the info box of a given resource—be it an Account, User, VPC, Subnet, VM Instance, Image, etc—and can be easily copied to your clipboard:

It's important to understand that names are not unique identifiers, please provide all relevant IDs with your support request.

Zadara Storage Resources

In order to ensure that our team can identify the correct resources relevant to your Zadara Storage support request, we require you to supply the Cloud Name, and name/ID of all the resource(s) in question.

note: Where a problem relates to another area or screen, then please ensure that information is detailed. Maybe a Command Centre or Provisioning Portal issue unrelated to a particular storage resource.

Cloud name

Every VPSA and VPSA Object Store resides inside a specific cloud. For Support to look at an issue you must include the Cloud Name. 

All VPSAs and VPSA Object Stores include the Cloud Name on the Dashboard:

If you use our On-Prem-as-a-Service offering, you can also find the Cloud Name on the Command Center dashboard:

VPSA name/ID

If your support request is related to one or more VPSAs and/or VPSA Object Stores (ZIOS/NGOS), you must include the exact name(s) or ID(s) of each one.

VPSA Resources

There are a number of resources that can be found within a VPSA—drives, RAID Groups, Pools, Volumes, Server Records, etc—and all of these has a unique ID. You must include all relevant IDs with your support request so our team can identify them.

IDs can be found in the VPSA web GUI in the Properties tab of each resource:

Description of the Issue or Problem itself

Try to describe the issue you have, and only describe one major issue in one ticket. Do not raise multiple issues in a single ticket it can lead to confusion and delay if issues are unrelated and need to be relayed to other subject matter experts.
Try to give specific details and do not refer to a call or chat that may have taken place earlier with one support individual (who may work in a separate office and/or timezone); this will delay the resolution and bottleneck the problem.

• Is the problem within the Zadara product screens.
• Is the issue when using the product.
• Include any error messages or warnings.
• Screenshots are useful to us.
• Is the issue seen all the time or infrequently.
• When did the problem start.
• Has the issue stopped or is it ongoing
• When the issue happened or happens - please provide full date(s) and time(s) with timezone
• Has your local environment changed recently
• Are you aware of any recent changes that may relate to the problem
• What tests have you applied and what responses do you get.
• Anything else not listed above, but also useful in giving us context when investigating a problem/problems.

Where a problem is not easily described or complex to do so then we can arrange a screen share session to "see" the problem more directly.

Additional Guidance

VPSA Internal Ticket Support

It's recommended that VPSA Storage Customers use the VPSAs internal Ticket Support request option as this automatically ensures the Cloud Name and VPSA name are reported. You can optionally tick the "Create Zsnap" box and that will trigger a "log" roll which can be used for analysis ie: for performance analysis work.
 

VPSA Storage:  System -> Support -> Tickets -> Create 

Bridge Calls

Customers requesting Bridge calls - whilst these can be useful for operational work with known planned  steps, these tend to be less worthwhile when dealing with a recently developed issue where deeper analysis is required.  
We can arrange to return calls or for screen sessions to relay information and progress back to customers.