Creating a good Support Request Ticket

Creating a good support ticket enables us to help you more effectively. By providing the errors, logs, and screenshots we need up-front, you empower us to resolve your tickets faster. This article provides some tips to help us help you.

One ticket per issue

It is best to raise distinct issues in separate tickets. Keeping distinct issues in their own tickets helps maintain clarity about the state of a ticket and its issue. When a ticket contains multiple issues, the chance of an important detail being missed increases.

If you are not sure whether something should be a raised in a new ticket, create a new ticket anyway and tell us about any other tickets that might be related. We can always close the new ticket as a duplicate which will not count against your subscription’s ticket limit.

It is especially important to always create a new ticket if you encounter a new Severity 1 issue. Creating a new ticket ensures that the message about your issue will be seen, especially if the owner of your existing ticket is out of the office or otherwise unavailable.

Please do not create new tickets asking for updates about existing tickets. If you would like an update for an existing ticket, drop a message in the ticket to ask for an update. We aim to respond to you as soon as we can.

Specific and descriptive titles

Keep your ticket titles specific and descriptive. For example, Broken login page hints at the problem but does not say what exactly is wrong—how is the login page broken? A better title might be Unable to log in: 502 error.

A good ticket title usually contains a specific and descriptive summary of the issue and an error code.

If you cannot see an error code or the error is too long to fit in the title, including only a specific and descriptive summary of the issue is okay. Long error codes should always be included as part of your detailed description.

Detailed descriptions

The best descriptions include the steps you took before encountering the issue. We can use these steps to replicate the issue or check to see if you missed something.

Provide as much detail as you can including:

• Details of recent changes to your system
• Steps you took before encountering the issue
• Evidence of the issue including errors, log files, and screenshots

Recent changes

Recent changes to your system include:

• Opsview updates
• OS updates
• System restarts
• Network outages
• Running opsview-deploy
• Any other Opsview or OS configuration changes

Steps you took

Be as detailed and precise as possible when documenting the steps you took. If you were following our documentation, include a link to the page and indicate the step where you encountered the issue.

It can be helpful to take some time to review the steps in our documentation and confirm you followed them all correctly. If you find a piece of documentation unclear, let us know in your ticket and we will endeavor to fix it.

Evidence

Complete error messages

Include complete error messages in your ticket descriptions where possible. They may look like gibberish, but they often contain useful information. Please do not only include the bits of an error message that look important to you—this prevents inadvertently omitting important details.

Log files

Often, the best way to send us full error messages is by sending us your Opsview log files. Useful logging information is stored in several places but the main opsview.log files usually contain everything we need.

When sending us log files, it is helpful to include the time you experienced an error so we can find the relevant log messages quickly.

Use a command like this to bundle and compress your Opsview log files in /var/tmp so you can send them to us:

tar -czvf /var/tmp/$(date +"%y%m%d")-opsview-logs.tar.gz /var/log/opsview/* 

There is a size limit on uploads to the Support Portal so please compress your logs before attaching them. The command above does this for you.

Opsview deploy files and Ansible logs

If you encounter an issue specifically when running opsview-deploy, send us your deploy files and Ansible logs instead of the normal Opsview log files.

Use a command like this to bundle your deploy files and Ansible logs in /var/tmp so you can send them to us:

find /opt/opsview/deploy -type d \( -name etc -o -name log \) -exec tar --exclude=user_secrets.yml -czvf /var/tmp/$(date +"%y%m%d")-opsview-deploy.tar.gz {} +

Screenshots

Wherever possible, include screenshots demonstrating the issue. Pictures really are worth a thousand words for more complex issues, especially for issues affecting the UI.

Ensure your screenshots show the entire window rather than just a section of the window you think is important. This prevents the accidental omission of important details.

Please also ensure your screenshots are legible and have descriptive filenames. For example, 502 error when logging in.jpg is much better than image1.jpg.

Command line output

If you encounter an issue on the command line, it is often easier for us if you include the command line output in an attached text file rather than a screenshot.

Simply copy and paste the command line output to a text file, including the full commands you used, and upload the file in the Support Portal.