Contacting IBM Support

Before you open a support case

Before contacting IBM Support, your company must have an active IBM software maintenance contract, and you must be authorized to submit problems to IBM.

Follow the steps in this topic to contact IBM Support.

Check the troubleshooting and known issues sections

Before you contact IBM Support, review the following topics and check whether your problem is already reported and a workaround or solution exists. For more information, see Troubleshooting.

Collect support information

If you cannot find a solution for your problem in the z/OS Connect documentation, complete the steps in Opening a support case with IBM Support.

Determine the business impact of your problem

When you report a problem to IBM, you are asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are reporting. Use the following criteria:

Opening a support case with IBM Support

If you cannot find a solution to your problem in z/OS Connect documentation, open a support case with IBM Support.

You can submit your problem in by phone or online. If opening a support case with IBM by phone, for the phone number to call in your country, go to the contacts page of the IBM Support Handbook on the web and click the name of your geographic region.

To submit a support case online, complete the following steps:

1. Go to https://www.ibm.com/mysupport and click Open a case.

2. Log in with your IBMid and password, and consent to the IBM Privacy Statement.

3. Enter the case details. Enter the meaningful title that summarizes your problem. Then, select the Product Manufacturer, Product, and Severity.

   Note: The case severity is based on the business impact of the problem. If you set the case severity as 1, you need to have 24x7 availability to work with IBM support on this issue.

4. Provide the detailed description of your problem. A detailed description can help support understand your problem more accurately and thus provide solutions or answers more quickly. The following information is crucial:

   1. When did the problem first occur?
   2. Has z/OS Connect ever worked or is it a new setup?
   3. Is the problem a one-time failure or reoccurring?
   4. Was software or hardware maintenance applied?
   5. Did the failure occur while you did a specific task?
   6. Is the failure that is occurring in more than one address space?
   7. What was the intended outcome?
5. It is important to provide the z/OS Connect level because the functions available in the product changes with the service level. This level information is present in the z/OS Connect Server's job log and the messages.log. For example,

   BAQR0000I: z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition version 3.0.18.0 (20190213-1445) 

   And at the beginning of the server's messages.log and trace.log:

   product = WAS FOR Z/OS 24.0.0.12, z/OS Connect 03.00.90 (wlp-1.0.96.cl241220241119-0657)

6. Operating system version, release, and maintenance levels.
7. Version and release levels of related products (for example CICS, IMS, Db2, Java™).
8. A valid contact phone number and email address.
9. For API Toolkit users, the operating system version, release, and maintenance levels the API Toolkit is installed on plus the version of the API Toolkit. The API Toolkit version is available from Help, Installation Details. For example:

   

10. For z/OS Connect Designer, the container runtime version, release, and maintenance levels plus the release of z/OS Connect Designer.
11. For the API provider Gradle plug-ins or API requester Gradle plug-ins, the operating system version, release, and maintenance levels the Gradle plug-in is running in, plus the version of the Gradle plug-in.
12. For the Build Toolkit, the operating system version, release, and maintenance levels the Build Toolkit is installed on plus the version of the Build Toolkit.

To find out what information and files you need to supply when opening a case, see the MustGather topics in Support.

If the problem you submit is for a software defect or for missing or inaccurate documentation, IBM Support creates an Authorized Program Analysis Report (APAR). The APAR describes the problem in detail. Whenever possible, IBM Support provides a workaround for you to implement until the APAR is resolved and a fix is delivered.

IBM publishes resolved APARs on the IBM product support web pages daily so that other users who experience the same problem can benefit from the same resolutions.

Exchanging data with IBM Support

1. See Exchanging information with IBM Technical Support for FTP and email instructions by using the IBM Enhanced Customer Data Repository (ECuRep).
2. See How to Open a Case to open a case or update an existing case. If you have an IBM z Systems Premier Software Care (formerly SoftwareXcel enterprise edition for zSeries) contract, you can also ask a nondefect installation and usage questions.
   Note: Always update your Service Request (problem record) to indicate that new data is available.

About z/OS Connect APARs and PTFs