Support process

In order to understand and resolve your support requests quickly and accurately it is important that you take the following steps before you contact a VDEL support center.

Many customers resolve their technical issue via Knowledgebases of VDEL vendors. Prior to contacting our technical support, please search vendors Knowledgebases as your question or issue may already be a known case.

If you still need to contact VDEL for support, you will need to gather information about your support entitlement and problem and have it on hand when discussing the situation with the VDEL technical engineer.

The following steps are an example of what is required.

1. Define the Problem

   Being able to articulate the problem and symptoms before contacting VDEL support will expedite the problem solving process. It is important that you be as specific as possible in explaining a problem or question to our support engineers. It is also beneficial to explain the steps you used to reproduce the problem.
   VDEL support engineers want to be sure that they provide you with exactly the right solution. The better they understand your specific problem scenario, the better they are able to resolve it.

2. Gather Background Information

   To efficiently solve a problem, the support engineer needs to have all the relevant information about the problem. Being able to answer the following questions will help us in our efforts in resolving your issue:

   • What version of operating system and vendor product are you running?
   • What steps led to the failure?
   • Can the problem be recreated? If so, what steps are required?
   • Have any changes been made to the system that might have triggered the issue?
   • Were any messages or other diagnostic information produced? If yes, what were they?
   • Were there any error number(s) or any messages received during the time of issue?
3. Gather Relevant Diagnostic Information (if possible)

   It is often necessary that our support engineers analyze specific diagnostic information, such as a sysreport, dumps, traces, logs, etc., in order to resolve your problem. Please provide as much of this information as possible. It will be critical in resolving your problem.
   If you are unsure as to how to gather diagnostic information, please contact VDEL Technical Support.

4. Determine the Severity Level

   VDEL Technical Support strives to respond to all customer inquiries and requests in a timely manner. When submitting an issue, you will need to assign a severity level to it based on the following table so we have an understanding of the impact a problem is having on your organization.

   • Severity One (Urgent)

     Catastrophic production problem which may severely impact the Client's production systems, or in which Client's production systems are down or not functioning; loss of production data and no procedural work around exists. Severity 1 problem also includes issues that result in an emergency condition that cause a serious security breach.

   • Severity Two (High)

     High-impact problem in which the Client's operation is disrupted but there is capacity to remain productive and maintain necessary business-level operations. Severity 2 problem also applies for minor security breach situations.

   • Severity Three (Medium)

     Medium-to-low impact problem which involves partial non-critical functionality loss. One which impairs some operations but allows the Client to continue to function. This may be a minor issue with limited loss or no loss of functionality or impact to the Client's operation and issues in which there is an easy circumvention or avoidance by the end user. This includes documentation errors.

   • Severity Four (Low)

     General usage questions, recommendations for future product enhancements or modifications and to calls that are passed to Red Hat for information purposes. There is no impact on the quality, performance or functionality of the product.