Call Home in IAS

The Call Home service is an automated notification process that detects problem conditions on the IBM® Integrated Analytics 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 appliance. If you enable the feature, Platform Manager will pass to Call Home any of a range of serviceable events, including hardware failures in servers, storage, network switches or Power Distribution Units. Events can also be passed to Call Home for software errors including OS and Db2 core files. The Call Home function opens a service alert 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 PMR for your system that is then assigned to a Support engineer for investigation. The PMR is identical to a PMR that you create when you report problems for your appliance. The Call Home service ensures that the PMR contains the required information about the system and problem. You can review and update the PMR with more information and follow its progress as you would for any PMR that you create manually. The customer contacts that you designate also receive an email with the PMR 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 PMR 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 IBM Integrated Analytics 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 PMR has been filed including the PMR'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.

Important: The Call Home service is not required. If you do not enable Call Home, you can still open PMRs by using the standard IBM Support processes. If you choose to enable Call Home, you can configure and enable the service yourself, or you can obtain assistance from IBM Support to configure the Call Home service on deployed systems. For new systems, the IBM installation engineer can help you to set up the Call Home service. You can disable the Call Home service at any time to temporarily or permanently stop the automatic notifications and collection of problem information.