Introduction to the Customer Support Portal (Red Hat/JBoss)

Hi, and welcome to another Red Hat video tutorial. What I want to do in this video is help customers who have access to our support portal. I want to just help you guys get started, take a look around, show you how to submit a ticket so you have an opportunity to get involved in the customer support portal and have access to all the resources that that site provides. So what you'll see here is I've gone to our support portal. It's found at access.redhat.com. So you can go there now and take a look. It'll bring you to this page. It'll bring you to this page regardless of whether you're signed in or not. You'll be able to search articles, browse product documentation, etc. Usually there are two main things that we want to do in this portal. One is be able to get access to the software that we are entitled to, and two, have the ability to access support, submit tickets, and get help when we need it. So let's take a look at both options. So the first thing we're gonna do is select Downloads. This will show you the software that you have access to. You'll notice my area of expertise is JBoss, so we'll be looking at the JBoss Enterprise Middleware, but you also have, right, the beauty of this new customer support portal is that it combines both your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions as well as your JBoss subscriptions. So it gives you the ability to see both from a single environment, which is nice. So you'll notice here you have the ability, if you have an active subscription, you can download your software. If you don't and you want to do an evaluation, you'll notice the software you can execute or get evaluation subscriptions for. So I'm going to go to "Download Your Software." It's going to ask me to log in, in which case I will log in. Um, what is my password? Ooh, goodness. Once you are logged in, you'll be in the software download section of the site. This will give you a dropdown list of all of the products that you have entitlements to. So my list that you see here might be a little bit more exhaustive than the list that you will see, but it's based on the entitlements that you have. If you know you have an entitlement and it's not in this list, just contact your account rep, um, and they will be able to help make sure that that is, uh, updated. So what we're gonna do is just take a look, for example, at installing O, the portal. So I select the portal platform, and you'll notice what it does is update the environment to show me what downloads are available for the portal. So you can see the WCM technology preview for what will be Insight Publisher in the future, as well as, um, the Portal Platform. Alright. Um, so the download process is pretty simple. You pick an item down from the list and then you download the binaries and install them. Now, if you are running into concerns or issues with the software that you have installed and are working with, you can then go to our support tab. In the Support tab, you can go in and submit new cases, um, see existing cases, and see our support policies. So I'm gonna select Support Cases. So for Support Cases, you'll notice here, um, you will have a collection of JBoss Utilities that you can, based on your subscription, submit tickets on or get help on from our support engineers. So I'm gonna say continue. And once I do that, it's gonna take me into a list of existing support cases that I have open. However, if I just wanna submit a new case, I can go over here and choose Open a New Case. Once I open a new case, I will wanna give it a title. I'll select the product, which you'll see all the products that you have an entitlement for listed. I'll select the version. Um, some components have modules attached to each version, some do not, so don't be surprised if you select a version and there are no modules there, because that just means that in that product, there were no submodules that were needed. Which environment is affected also will need to be selected. Uh, that'll let the support engineers know the level of interest that you have in getting that problem solved, where that is, uh, and then severity level is also very important. So depending on whether you're in development or production, you'll have a couple different options available to you there. We also recommend providing a detailed description. Now, just to give you an idea, this detailed description should include, you know, if you have a stack trace, maybe one, the first stack in that stack trace, an identification of files that you may have changed, the nature of the problem, the use case that you're testing, right? The more detailed you can be, the easier it will be for support to answer your problem in their first response back to you. Now, to be honest, the support engineers, their goal really is to get you resolved as quickly and with as little back and forth as possible, right? We don't want to have 12 emails going back and forth to solve your problem. So the more detail we can provide as those asking for help, the easier it will be for them to solve that problem. And they usually are, you know, requesting that. Now, once you have submitted a case, you can use what's called Issue Tracker to add attachments to your case if you choose to do that. So I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. Um, but you'll see here you can, uh, provide all that information, open a new case, and once that new case is opened— I'm gonna go back to that support case at that main site— I can go to Issue Tracker and see a little bit more detailed, uh, view of that information. So here I will log in, and I'll be able to see the level of support that has been implemented on the different cases that I have access to. I can go over to my navigation tree and see all my open cases. I can then also create a new issue if I choose to. We don't really recommend that you use this environment to create your issues. It's better to utilize the support portal as you saw in the past, but this can give you some details as to what is happening with a specific case. I'm gonna go ahead and open this case, for example, and you'll be able to see the ability for me to see the status, see how long it's been open, and most importantly, have these actions that I can supply, giving me the ability to attach files as well as provide more sophisticated explanations of the problem that I might be having. So If you do not know who your Solutions Architect is, they would be the person that usually would communicate to this site for you. If you don't know who they are, again, count— contact your account representative and they would be able to align you with that person. But this just makes sure that your account team is well aware of the concerns that you have and that we have the ability as your account team to escalate those concerns if necessary. So as I mentioned, two different aspects of the support, or of the customer support portal. One is the ability to submit tickets through support, which I just showed you. The other is the ability to download software. What you'll start to see moving forward is a very, very significant shift in our documentation processes that will add content to what we call our knowledge base. So you'll see we have a reference library already in-house. You'll notice we have a set of links here associated with that. This is the best place for you to go to get documentation. I know that I, as a person in charge of writing a lot of this documentation, I will be posting, you know, white papers, tech sheets, performance documentation, anything that I've developed, videos, tutorials like this, will be added to this site. So keep an eye on that. Be sure to keep you know, notified, or make sure that you're checking on the site often to be sure you're not missing out on any content that might be being added on a daily basis. So thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it, and good luck, and feel free to contact your account team anytime you have a problem. We'd be happy to help. Take care. Bye.