SovLabs Customers: How to Manage Your Support Requests

• Introduction
• Where to find us
• Before you Begin
• How to View Existing Tickets
• How to Open a Ticket
• How we work your ticket 
  • Assignment and Ownership
  • Examples of issues outside of Scope for Support
  • Support Request Closure

Introduction

The new Helpdesk portal will have a different look and feel from the support.sovlabs.com portal. This article will help you navigate the support ticket lifecycle.

 Where to find us

Our support portal can now be found at http://support.cloudbolt.io.

Before you Begin

Go to http://support.cloudbolt.io/ and request to change your password by using the Forgot my Password link on the Sign-in form. Use the same email address you used in the SovLabs portal.  

 

Once you’re logged in, you should be able to see your open and closed tickets, as they have been imported into the help desk. If you don’t see them, make sure you used the correct email address.

If you have any problems with accessing the support portal please send an email to support@cloudboltsoftware.com with a Subject of "SovLabs Portal help".

How to View Existing Tickets

After you have logged in, you’ll land on a page that looks like this. All your ticket requests will be on this page.

 

Click on the ticket subject to view the information in the ticket. You can filter using the Status dropdown at the top-right.

How to Open a Ticket

From the Requests page, click on the CloudBolt Software link or the CloudBolt logo at the top left:

NOTE: You will not be able to update the ticket fields on tickets in this portal once they are submitted.  You will only be able to add comments.  This is expected behavior.

 

Click on the New Support Ticket icon at the top

 

You will see a dropdown list to select your product. Choose SovLabs vRA Extensibility Plugin from the dropdown. You will also see CloudBolt and OneFuse as options here.

Be sure to choose the correct product as it will affect what fields are available on the ticket form, and to which team the ticket is assigned.

 

Fill out the fields with as much detail as possible, and click the Submit button.

How we work your ticket

Assignment and Ownership

When you submit your ticket, it will be assigned to the appropriate team within CloudBolt Support. You’ll receive an email notification with the ticket information and ticket number. You can interact with the ticket from your email (don’t change the subject line), or you can interact from within the support portal as shown above.

 

A specific Engineer is assigned to your ticket and owns your problem until the ticket is resolved. He or she will contact you via the ticket as appropriate during the resolution process. Your responsibility is to have the appropriate people and resources available to work with the Support Engineer during the service hours defined in your support agreement and to provide requested information about the issue and about your environment. Typically, this would be during business hours but could be 24/7 given the severity of the problem.

 

Occasionally, we may reassign a ticket from one Engineer to another due to differences in time zones or if different product expertise is required.  The Support Engineer works with you to try to resolve the issue, taking whatever steps necessary to first fully diagnose the problem and then to find a solution.

This may involve:

• Asking you for more information
• Asking you to perform a restart of vRealize Automation components, or entire stack
• Asking you to install updates and/or patches to the SovLabs vRA Extensibility plugin
• Asking for specific debug data from your system and, if necessary, conducting tests to generate this data
• Trying to reproduce the problem in our lab environment
• Asking for your code, data or software to help reproduce the problem
• Verifying software bugs with our engineering staff
• Asking you to implement and test workaround suggestions that may avoid the problem
• Asking you to involve networking, database or other technology specific administrators to help troubleshoot
• Working with you to involve relevant third party software or hardware vendors (for example, your operating system and database vendors) if we suspect a problem in their product
• Asking for a screen-sharing session between your staff and a Support Engineer.   A screen sharing session may be an option if all requested information has been provided to SovLabs and SovLabs has had reasonable time to review.  Deciding whether a screen sharing session is warranted will be at the discretion of the engineer working your ticket.

If it is determined that the issue is outside the scope of Support we may consider the Support Ticket to be resolved and you’ll be notified before the ticket is closed.

Examples of issues outside of Scope for Support

• vRA/vRO outage or degradation caused by environmental issues including but not limited to
  • vRA database failure
  • DNS changes or resolution failure
  • expired or improperly updated certificates in vRA
  • failed upgrades to vRA or upgrade to an unsupported vRA version (See Compatibility Matrix)
  • load balancer issues
  • improperly configured health checks
  • issues with vRA VIP and pool configurations

• Internal infrastructure/environment issues
  • networking/connectivity
  • storage
  • DNS resolution issues
  • IP address conflicts

• vCenter upgrades, outages/issues including but not limited to
  • VM template issues - generally any issue that happens before vRA's machineRequested lifecycle would be considered outside of support
  • issues caused by expired or improperly updated certificates in the PSC and/or vCenter
  • any other environment issues which might cause vRA or one of its component services to stop working

• Integration issues including but not limited to
  • issues caused by upgrading an integration SovLabs interfaces with to a version not in SovLabs compatibility matrix
  • issues with integrations that are no longer supported by that integration's vendor.

We will do our best to help you narrow down the issue, but you as the customer are responsible for resolving these types of issues, and opening and managing any support tickets with the appropriate vendor.

Support Request Closure

Once there is a mutually agreed-upon resolution, the ticket can be closed either by you, the customer or by the Support Engineer.