Originally posted on IBM Developer blog “Exploring PureApplication System, Software Service and more” by Krishna Moorthy Venkataraman on 20 November 2017 (4879 visits)
Most of you are famliar with “Call Home”, a feature that is available on PureApplication System and Bluemix Local System. The official name of this feature is Service and Support Manager. Most clients use it to automatically open a ticket (PMR) with IBM Support as triggered by certain system events. A system event of type “Call Home” is considered by IBM to require involvement of IBM Support, Service and Support Manager can automatically open the PMR on behalf of the system administrator. You can read more about Service and Support Manager in the IBM Knowledge Center here.
When clients have Service and Support Manager configured, it can be used for in another scenario as well as IBM has enhanced the capabilities of Service and Support Manager over time. Imagine that an administrator opens a PMR with IBM Support directly, for example using the IBM Service Request tool. In many cases, IBM Support will ask the administrator for additional logs and traces to help them debug the issue reported through the PMR. Most clients would manually collect the system logs, downloading them from the system and then uploading them to IBM using the IBM Service Request tool. WIth the Service and Support Manager feature enabled, an administrator can simplify this process by associating the existing PMR with a Problem and letting Service and Support Manager upload the system logs directly to IBM Support.
In the steps below we have outlined this process; in this example the administrator has already opened PMR 53867,082,000 manually and now wants to collect and uploading system logs requested by IBM Support for that PMR.
1. From the PureApplication System user interface, navigate to System > System Troubleshooting.
2. Click on Collect System Logs, which will open a dialog box to specify the exact system logs to be collected.
3. It will take a while for the system collection set to be completed. Once this is done though, click on the “phone icon” as shown below.
4. This will open a dialog box to open a new Problem. Normally when you create new Problem with Service and Support Manager, it creates a corresponding PMR with IBM Support. However we can also create a new Problem and associated it with an existing PMR, in our case 53867,082,000. Click Submit to create the Problem.
5. After clicking Submit a job called “create” will be executed by the system. You can monitor this job from System > Job Queue as shown below.
6. Once the job has completed successfully, go to System > Problems and select the newly created Problem that is associated with PMR 53867,082,000. Scroll down to Service Ticket Files section and click Add collection set to associate the Collection Set of logs to the Problem.
7. Once the collection set has been added, click the “Upload” icon to upload the collection set directly to IBM Support.
8. The upload is done through another job called “uploadfile”, which again can be monitored through System > Job queue.
Once you become familiar with the above process, providing additional logs and collection sets to IBM Support becomes much easier. And in most cases the actual uploads will be much faster as well, since they use the internet connection from the PureSystems Manager (PSM) nodes.
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