automic support tips and tricks

Support Tips & Tricks

November 2015

Darren Sniezak

Support Tips & Tricks

+ Automic Support – How It Works

+ Contact Zero – Improve Resolution Times

+ Applications Manager Initial Troubleshooting

+ ONE Automation Initial Troubleshooting

Automic Support

• Team of 73 technical experts

• Located in 5 delivery centers across the world

• All ITIL certified

– We speak the IT language of our customers

• Speak English, German, and French as part of our standard offering for our

services

• Languages that we can also assist in if needed; Spanish, Italian, Cantonese,

Mandarin, Dutch, Arab, Turkish, Vietnamese.

• Our follow the sun organization resolves 24000 cases a year

Automic Support

We have you covered

Support Offices

Bellevue

Vienna

Montreal

Customer Service Catalogue Structure

Support Offering

Silver Gold Platinum

Technical Support Coverage 24/7 24/7 24/7

Incident management with standard SLA(Resolution time: 24h for P1, 7d for P2) ✔ ✔

Incident management with platinum SLA(Resolution time: 6h for P1, 48h for P2) ✔

Root Cause Analysis for critical incidents (P1) ✔ ✔ ✔

Root Cause Analysis for high incidents (P2) ✔

TAM (Technical Account Manager) ✔ ✔

Customized review for product enhancement requests ✔

Assistance through the Functional and Technical Community ✔ ✔ ✔

Access to Automic AppStore Self Service ✔ ✔ ✔

E-learning & On-line certification 2 5 10

Automic Standard SLA Penalties ✔

• The largest time sink in resolution of a ticket is gathering all of the required

information.

• Gathering everything in the first communication drastically improves resolution

time. (Contact One)

• Never having to gather the information to begin with is even faster. (Contact

Zero).

Contact Zero - The Idea

New In Progress

Need Further information

Development Escalation

Solution Suggested

Closed

• Self Service

– KBE’s

– Community

– Tribal Knowledge

• What about when Self Service doesn’t work?

– Contact support

Contact Zero – How Do We Get There?

• Version Information

• When Did This Start?

– What changed?

• Is it reproducible?

– What are the steps as well as you can tell.

• What is the impact?

• What are your expectations?

What To Provide Support?

• Automic Support is moving to an ITIL structure. This will separate issues into

Incidents and Problems:

– Incidents:

• An unplanned service interruption, or a significant performance decrease, for which there is no

viable workaround.

• These have a stricter SLA.

– Problems:

• The as-yet unidentified underlying cause of a series of incidents or an isolated incident of

considerable importance.

• These have a looser SLA.

• This includes root cause analysis (RCA).

Changes to Support – Salesforce and ITIL

• Keywords can help set expectations and priority correctly:

– When creating a Case, use terms that help us properly identify your issue.

• “This is happening right now.” - Incident

• “We have no workaround.” - Incident

• State the environment clearly.

• State the impact and timeline clearly.

• “If this can’t be resolved within 2 weeks, we’ll be unable to perform financial close.”

• “We have consultants coming out in a month, we need a workaround before that project begins.”

What This Means For You

Applications Manager

Applications Manager Debug

DebugFAQ.html helpful in determining what debug to enable per your situation.

What debug do I enable?:

Use when issue is reproducible on demand or no restart/crashing of process expected.

Check Box:

Use when debugging start up issues or when you expect Agent/Automation Engine to crash..

Command Line:

Useful when you know an issue happens around a specific time.

Setting with an awexe call:

RmiServer and AgentService debug can be turned on from the command line or in

a script.

awexe SCHEDULE_DEBUG START_TIME=<HH:mm> MINUTES=<mmm>

Job must be imported in. Useful to minimize growth of logs and when issue occurs at a specific time.

Set RMI Debug with a job in V9.0:

YY/MM/DD/24h

If error occurred at 0700 on the 19th of July what

If error occurred at 0700 on the 19th of July what RmiServer<timestamp>.log would you send in?

Text to search for in logs:

AwE- Our standard error code.

ERR Generally a return code from script. Found mostly in job’s

output file.

ORA- The -20000 and -20999 are reserved for the application while

rest are Oracle errors.

ONE Automation

• Support Tools:

– Trace Scheduler

– Logfile Collector

– Profile Based Support

• Automic World Tools:

– Activities Window Cleanup

– Transport Case Creator

– Maintenance Workflow

Support Tools

23 Property of Automic Software. All rights reservedProperty of Automic Software. All rights reservedPresentation by

Trace Scheduler – What is it?

• Current process

• Identify the problem

• Tell Support the problem

• Read a KBE

• Get on a WebEx

• Put an event in place

• Trace Scheduler

• Download the Support Tool

• Run the Support Tool

Logfile Collector – What is it?

• Current process

• Tell Support the problem

• Support requests logs from multiple locations

• Time is spent gathering all logs

• Some might be missing

• Log Collector

• Download/Setup the Support Tool

• Run the Support Tool

• Zip the files and send to Support

Profile Based Support – What is it?

• What info does Support always need?

• BUILD INFO (cue the screenshots)

Mitch Denis

Profile Based Support – What’s in it for me?

• Change the conversation

• Hi, Joe, what system are we looking at?

• And what agent?

• What Support sees

Mitch Denis

ONE Automation - Tracing

• When:

– You start to experience performance issues.

• Before a period when you know you have performance issues.

– You have an issue you can reproduce.

Tracing: When, Why, How?

• Why:

– Tracing gives the technical information necessary to investigate the root cause versus the

messages which are designed to be more ‘user-readable’.

• Why not leave it on all the time?

– Tracing can have impact on the overall performance of the system.

– Tracing can become extremely large if not managed carefully.

– Tracing is far more useful in limited windows.

• How:

– In most situations System Overview – Component – Properties:

• How:

– In some circumstances, we need the trace set directly in the .ini file of the component and that

component rebooted. For example:

– If there is any doubt which way is better to capture, use the .ini files.

– If there is any doubt what components to trace, err on the side of more tracing.

[TRACE]tcp/ip=0database=0

[TRACE]tcp/ip=2database=4

• What Tracing?

– Automation Engine:

• TCP/IP=2, DB=4 on the CP’s and WP’s

– CP’s have to be done individually from the System Overview

– OS Agents:

• TCP/IP=9

– RA Agents:

• RA=9

– Webservice: RA=12 (only from the .ini file)

– SAP:

• TCP/IP=5, RFC=9

• A cheat sheet is available at support.automicworld.com

Tracing: When, Why, How?, What??

Questions?

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