Using Itential Service Desk to Create a Support Ticket

How to Access the Itential Service Desk

Support Ticket generation requires an Itential Service Desk (ISD) access account. To request access to the Itential Service Desk, contact your Itential Account representative.

Customers with a Service Desk account can access the Itential Service Desk and other related support tools using the Customer Portal link.

How to Create a Product Support Ticket

To generate a Product Support ticket:

1. Click the Login button in the upper-right corner of the screen.

2. Upon login, users will find a card display for the Service Desk and other related areas.

   

3. Click the Itential Service Desk card to access the Service Desk portal.

4. Select the appropriate category for the ticket that needs to be generated. Use the Ticket Category table below.

   Note:

   Product support tickets generated outside of the Itential Service Desk against any other portals will be cancelled.

   

5. Select the appropriate ticket.

6. Click the appropriate item under the label “What can we help you with?”

7. Complete the ticket fields. Fields marked with red asterisks are required.

8. Click Send to submit the ticket.

Ticket Categories

Impact Field Values and Definitions

The Impact field is displayed on the Service Desk portal page when the user selects "Report a software problem". To help you select the appropriate value for the Impact field, use the following definitions.

Share With Field

The Share with field at the bottom of the ticket is important and exists to ensure that SLAs for your organization are followed. Some members of a deployment may be contractors or other external delivery providers which provide services to more than one Itential customer. In these cases, the contractor generating the ticket will need to specify the organization to which the request relates (e.g. “Share with Acme Corp”).

Report a Production System Outage

Within the Report a Problem category, there is an option to report a Production System Outage. Please note, this option should only be used if your PRODUCTION system is actively experiencing an outage. General software problems in development or lab systems are not considered outages.

Request Types

User related information (including tickets generated) can be found by clicking the Requests menu option next to your avatar in the upper-right corner of the screen.

To help you select the appropriate request type, use the following definitions.

Ticket Status Options

When viewing a ticket list, the default status type will be "Open requests". You may change the status by clicking the associated drop-down menu and selecting a status from the list.

Status Updates and Comment History

Once a ticket has been created through the Service Desk portal, continue using the portal to view status updates and related conversation (comment history) threads. This is the primary method by which status updates are made available and communicated.

In the event that you receive an email update and you are away from your computer or logged out of the Service Desk Portal, you may respond to the email and your comments will be added to your ticket.

Does IAP have a log file for errors and other important information?

The Itential Automation Platform (Pronghorn) log files are typically stored in the /var/log/pronghorn directory. If the log files are not found in that directory then check the $PRONGHORN_BASE/properties.json file. Look at the value of the loggerProps.log_directory to locate the log files.

Log messages can also be found in the systemd journal using the following command.

sudo journalctl -f

See the manual (man) pages of journalctl for more details.

How do I generate the "showsupport" output for my environment?

The showsupport command-line utility is executed as the pronghorn process user. Use the following steps to generate the output:

1. SSH to your Itential host and login as the pronghorn process user.

2. Execute the following commands.

   cd /opt/pronghorn/current
   ./showsupport
   ls -l ./showsupport*.gz
   

3. Download and attach the showsupport file to your Service Desk Ticket.

How do I generate a blueprint for my environment?

The blueprint is a generated JSON document of what is installed on the system, including out-of-box apps, adapters, as well as any custom apps and adapters, along with installed versions.

From the IAP home page:

1. Click Admin Essentials in the left navbar to open the application.

   

2. Click Blueprints in the Quick Start card and a dropdown menu displays.

3. Select Download to auto-generate and download the blueprint to your local machine to attach to your support ticket.

4. Alternately, use the Copy option to paste the contents in the Blueprint Output field on your support ticket.

5. Always include the contents of the Blueprint when you open ISD support tickets.