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Reference: Zendesk Support Ticket Best Practices

Thank you for using L7 Informatics products and services. We believe that product support is a vital part of the total customer experience. We want you to get the most from our products long after the initial sale and installation. To enable you to maximize the return on your investment, we offer a suite of support offerings designed to meet your business needs. The information contained herein is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication, but updates may be posted periodically to the L7 Informatics website.

Best Practices

Based on our experience in supporting customers, we would like to share with you some recommendations and best practices for a highly effective product support relationship.

Registering an Account on the L7 Zendesk Customer Portal

See this article about to create and access the Zendesk customer portal.

Support Ticket Best Practices - Checklist

Customers should attempt to include as much detail as possible to reduce the back and forth between detail gathering. Customers should attempt to include the following when possible:

  • Detailed description of request or issue

  • Date and time when issue first occurred

  • ESP instance(s) impacted (e.g., Prod, Dev, UAT, etc.)

  • Workflow Chain(s), Workflow(s), Protocol(s), Pipeline(s), App(s) or API(s) impacted

  • Is this related to local development or was it developed by L7

  • If this is an issue, is it reproducible?

    • If reproducible, provide steps needed to reproduce

    • If not reproducible, provide as many details as possible regarding circumstances where it could have occurred/when it did occur

  • Provide screenshots and/or videos to help detail the request or issue

  • Provide ESP logs, performance reports or any other relevant attachments if possible

    • In ESP version 3.0 and higher, ESP logs are typically found in /opt/l7esp/data/log from within the Docker container

    • Refer to Performance Checklist to Improve L7|ESP Experience for guidance on investigating Pipeline performanceReference: Performance Checklist to Improve L7|ESP Experience

  • For pipeline issues, provide associated stdout and stderr files

    • stdout and stderr files can be accessed from the ESP UI

    • Navigate to the Analysis app, Monitor tab

    • From the list, click on the pipeline name link to open the run details

    • Click on the pipeline name box to highlight

    • The stdout and stderr file links can be found in the far right column of the page

Working the Issue

An L7 Support representative is assigned to your support request and owns your problem until it is mutually agreed that it is resolved. From time to time, it may be necessary to reassign a support request from one support representative to another to facilitate a timely resolution.

The assigned support representative will contact you via the support ticket, email, and/or phone as appropriate during the resolution process.

Your responsibility is to have the appropriate people and resources available to work with the L7 support representative during the service hours defined in your support agreement.

The L7 support representative will work with you to resolve the issue, taking whatever steps are necessary to first fully diagnose the problem the to find a solution.

This may involve but is not limited to:

  • Asking for more information

  • Asking you to install specific software and/or patches where applicable

  • Asking for specific debug data from your system (and, if necessary, conducting tests to generate this data)

  • Trying to reproduce the issue on test machines where applicable

  • Asking for your code, data, or software to help reproduce the problem

  • Verifying software bugs with our engineering staff

  • Asking you to implement and test workaround suggestions that may avoid the issue

  • Asking you to involve networking, database, or other technology-specific administrators to help troubleshoot the issue

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