Supplying information to the IBM Support Center

Your first contact with the IBM® Support Center is with the call-receipt operator, who takes initial details and routes your call to the appropriate support group. You are then contacted by a Support Center representative who investigates your problem further.

You must tell the Support Center as much as possible about your problem, so have the information ready before making your first call. Write the information on a problem description worksheet. A sample worksheet is in Problem description worksheet.

The advantages of using a problem description sheet are as follows:
  • You communicate with the IBM Support Center by telephone. With all your findings documented on a worksheet, you are better prepared to respond to the questions that you might be asked.
  • You can maintain an in-house tracking system to record and document all problems. You can use this information for planning, organizing, communicating, and establishing priorities for controlling and resolving these problems.

When you contact the Support Center, tell the operator the name of your organization and your access code or customer number. Your access code or customer number is a unique code authorizing you to use IBM Software Services. You must give this code each time you contact the Support Center. Using this information, the operator locates your customer profile, which contains your address, contact names, telephone numbers, and details of the IBM products at your organization.

The Support Center operator asks you if this is a new problem or a further call on an existing one. If it is new, you are assigned a unique incident number. A problem management record (PMR) is opened in the Remote Technical Assistance Information Network (RETAIN) database, where all activity associated with your problem is recorded. The problem remains open until it is resolved.

Make a note of the incident number on your problem description worksheet and quote the incident number in all future calls connected with this problem.

If the problem is new to your organization, the operator asks you for the source of the problem in your system software; that is, the program that seems to be the cause of the problem. Because you are using this information, it is likely that you have already identified CICS® VR as the problem source. You must also give the CICS VR version, release, and relevant program update tape (PUT) numbers.

You must assign a severity level for the problem. Severity levels can be 1, 2, or 3:
Table 1. Severity levels–program update tape (PUT)
Security Level Description
1 Unable to use CICS VR, resulting in a critical condition that needs immediate attention.
2 Able to use CICS VR, but operation is severely restricted.
3 Able to use CICS VR, with limited functions, but the problem is not critical to your entire operation.

The call-receipt operator asks you for a brief description of the problem, and prompts you for keywords associated with the problem.

  • ABEND
  • ABENDU
  • DOC
  • INCORROUT
  • LOOP
  • MSG
  • PERFM
  • WAIT
The keywords correspond to the problem classification types shown in Problem determination procedures. Strings containing other keywords are also useful. These are not predefined, and might include these items:
  • A message number
  • An abnormal end (abend) code
  • Parameters associated with the problem
  • A CICS VR command

The keywords are used as search arguments on the RETAIN database, to see if your problem is known and already the subject of an authorized program analysis report (APAR).

You are not asked for more information at this stage, but keep all the information relevant to the problem, including logs, dumps, and traces.