Call Home

The Call Home service is an automated notification process that detects problem conditions on the Cloud Pak for Data System and reports them to IBM Support.

The Call Home service is an optional feature that improves and simplifies the work to report the most common types of problems that could occur on the system. If you enable the feature, Platform Manager will pass any of a range of serviceable events to Call Home, including hardware failures in servers, storage, or network switches. Events can also be passed to Call Home for software errors including OS and Db2 core files. The Call Home function opens a case if a serious error occurs on the system, automatically sending details of the error and contact information to IBM service personnel.

The Call Home service contacts the automated IBM Support servers, which open a case on Cognitive Support Platform (CSP) for your system that is then assigned to a Support engineer for investigation. This case is similar to the one you might open manually to report an issue, although this case will automatically contain the diagnostic data which should first be gathered for this type of issue. The Call Home service ensures that the case contains the required information about the system and problem. You can review and update the case with more information and follow its progress as you would for any case that you create manually. The customer contacts that you designate also receive an email with the case number.

The log files and diagnostics are the same files that IBM Support engineers request when first addressing an issue. Since the Call Home service includes these files in the automated notification, the case moves more quickly to analysis and resolution. If necessary, the Support engineer could contact your site administrators for more information as needed, but the initial information is already part of the Call Home problem report.

The Call Home service requires the Cloud Pak for Data System to have Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)/Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) access in the data center and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to communicate that a case has been filed including the case's initial status to the customer contact. If HTTPS/SOAP and SMTP access is not available or supported in your data center, you cannot use the Call Home service.