Automic Support Tips and Tricks

Support Tips & Tricks
November 2015
Darren Sniezak

2 Property of Automic Software. All rights reservedProperty of Automic Software. All rights reserved
Support Tips & Tricks
+ Automic Support – How It Works
+ Contact Zero – Improve Resolution Times
+ Applications Manager Initial Troubleshooting
+ ONE Automation Initial Troubleshooting

• 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
Hanoi
Paris
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
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 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.

• Support Tools:
– Trace Scheduler
– Logfile Collector
– Profile Based Support
• Automic World Tools:
– Activities Window Cleanup
– Transport Case Creator
– Maintenance Workflow
Support Tools

Presentation by
Trace Scheduler – What is it?
• Current process
• Identifythe problem
• Tell Support the problem
• Read a KBE
• Get on a WebEx
• Put an eventin place
• Trace Scheduler
• Identifythe problem
• Download the Support Tool
• Run the Support Tool

Presentation by
Logfile Collector – What is it?
• Current process
• Identify the problem
• Tell Support the problem
• Support requests logs from multiple locations
• Time is spent gathering all logs
• Some might be missing
• Log Collector
• Identify the problem
• Download/Setup the Support Tool
• Run the Support Tool
• Zip the files and send to Support

Presentation by
Profile Based Support – What is it?
• What info does Support always need?
• BUILD INFO (cue the screenshots)
Mitch Denis

Presentation by
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

• 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=0
database=0
[TRACE]
tcp/ip=2
database=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
– RAAgents:
• 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??

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