Application and Business expert troubleshooting responsibilities

The application and business expert tracks all changes to the application and system to determine if a change is causing a problem. They also interpret patch release notes and notify all internally affected parties and works closely with the database administrator and system expert to fix problems and increase performance.

The Application and Business expert performs the following responsibilities:
Determines severity level for PMRs
  • Determines the severity level of all PMRs based on impact to business operations only (impact to development or maintenance operations are only considered in so much as they affect business operations)
  • Follows guidelines to ensure that resources are properly allocated, does not overestimate the severity as this can have the effect of pulling resources off of other more important issues
  • Provides the reasoning to help the support team understand the business impact for sev 1 and 2, provides reasoning behind the severity level if severity 1 or 2
Performance
  • Always checks and interprets profiling information
  • Works with Database Administrator and System Expert to see if problem is in their area of expertise:
    • Check if items updating according to feed file
    • Activate debug logging for SQL scripts and check when things have been run
Enhancements
  • Is cognizant of all the ways users are using the product therefore able to determine the validity and impact of user enhancement requests
  • Determines the benefit to the business that the enhancement will have (quantified on a scale of 1-10) with associated reasoning
  • Understands the trade-off between costs and benefits and does not consider requests that would not add at least moderate benefit to the business
  • Always evaluates requests coming from users and does not simply forward them to Support
  • Understands all current application functionality to find ways to fulfill enhancement requests by existing means instead of submitting code change requests
  • Remembers to keep enhancement requests generic to the application and not tied to customer specific data, setup, or custom scripted functionality
  • Distinguishes between user requests for custom scripted functionality enhancements and product code change enhancements
Scripted solutions
  • Understands all custom scripted functions and solutions in order to be able to support them
  • Properly submits bug reports only relating to IBM® Product Master script operations, not custom scripted functionality
  • Never sends entire script to IBM Software Support directly, instead identifies problem in small script test case
Errors
  • Always works to determine the root cause of an error, fix it, and find a workaround
  • Provides all findings and problem research in ESR case log
  • Creates test cases to reproduce the problem and records all such tests in the ESR case log
  • If the problem is not consistently reproducible, flags this in the ESR case log by describing its nature as intermittent if appropriate
  • If error relates to the system, contacts the System Expert
  • If error relates to the database, contact the Database Administrator
  • Always thoroughly examines logs for all entries relating to the error event
Checking logs
  • Gets a timestamp for when the problem occurs and correlates errors or user observations with logs
  • Always checks audit logs to see what actions were occurring during a problem
  • Tries to determine if operations occurring in parallel are causing the problem
  • Understands different log levels and when to activate them (log4j2.xml file):
    • For example: setting up a monitoring window for all database SQLs to trap a problem
  • Understands impact to disk space and makes sure enough is available
  • Ensures that application logs never exceed the amount available of free space in the file system
  • When customer environment consists of more than one server, knows which server to investigate on
  • Knows which log files to examine:
    • Exception and default logs for script line numbers
    • Default for memory usage statistics
  • Knows how to get all the information needed from the logs