I hope you had as much fun watching our first episode as we did making it. And like the saying goes: One is none, we decided that we would make another episode. And this time we’re talking about getting support.

In this episode Alex and I are exploring what you can do if you need help. We talk about the different support levels basic, production and premium support, we also go into the severity and the ways for getting support.

When we think of getting support, we assume that things went wrong and we need support right now. Obviously that is true, but, and perhaps more important, you should think of your support options before there is a real crisis.

One of the items to consider is which level of support you want or need. How much downtime can you accept? Do you only have business that needs to be done during the day? And how much money/business/image do you loose when you are down during the day? For a company that only does their planning once a month it might be Ok to accept a lower support level. On the other hand, what will it cost you when you have downtime, exactly on your planning day? Will that be acceptable?

Another thing to consider is what you are doing when you get into a situation that you need help. Are you going to troubleshoot for a long time? Or are you making the best of your support options you have and create a service request / ticket?

And when we are talking about creating a ticket, you might want to prepare for it as well. Record all the information you can about your issue.

  1. What is the problem
  2. Who is having the problem
  3. When is the problem occurring
  4. Where is the problem occurring / which systems are impacted
  5. (if you can) Why is the problem occurring
  6. Did it ever worked in the first place?
  7. What changed since the time that the system or component was working
  8. Sketch your configuration/architecture. If not for the ticket, then for yourself as part of the troubleshooting process

If you recorded al the information above, go ahead an create log bundles for relevant systems.

Here’s a short list of links and other things we talked about:

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