Benefits of enabling call home

You should configure and enable the call home feature as it improves the user experience when IBM Storage Scale is used.

The call home feature when enabled provides the following benefits:

  1. Improves customer service response time
    • Scheduled data uploads:

      If the call home feature is enabled, then the IBM® support representatives can start with the analysis of the issue that is reported without any delay. The IBM support team can use the cluster data from the call home scheduled uploads to do an immediate analysis of the issue. For more information, see Scheduled data upload.

      However, if the call home feature is not enabled, then the IBM support team first collects debugging data from command outputs like gpfs.snap command. The whole process takes time to request, collect, and deliver the data, which might cause a delay in resolving the issue on the site.

    • Selected failure events trigger automatic call home uploads:

      If the call home feature is enabled, then the event-based uploads feature automatically collects the relevant component-specific information and uploads it to the IBM ECuRep server. The uploaded data enables the IBM support team to immediately find the root cause of the issue that is reported on the customer site. For more information, see Event-based uploads.

  2. Proactively detects issues
    • Detects violations against best practices and common misconfiguration.
    • Finds out which specific customer site is affected by the reported issue by using tools like High Impact Programming Error Authorized Program Analysis Report (HIPER APARs).
    • Constantly extends the list of automatically detected issues, best practice violations, and common misconfiguration over time.
    Note: The mmhealth command output and IBM Storage Scale GUI display the list of events that are resulted from proactively detected issues. For more information, see Proactive system health alerts.
  3. Improves customer support experience in areas of consumability and ease of usage
    • Uploads gpfs snaps directly from the IBM Storage Scale system:

      If the call home feature is enabled, then a customer can easily find out the customer number. The requested debugging data is transferred from the customer site cluster or node to the IBM support team by using the mmcallhome command.

    • Views system configuration changes that take places between call home data uploads:

      If the call home feature is enabled, then you can run the mmcallhome status diff command to easily detect the system configuration changes that took place between different time spans.

  4. Generates reports based on customer insights for support and development
    • Improves test and development for the features that are used by your cluster.
    • Provides more data to analyze the issues that are reported on the customer site. For example, the root cause of an issue can be diagnosed by using the historic call home data.
  5. Creates service tickets automatically for reported failures

    In Elastic Storage Server (ESS), if the call home feature is enabled, then the system automatically creates Salesforce service tickets for any hardware failures that are reported on customer sites.

    Note: A user can configure the call home settings on IBM Storage Scale or on Elastic Storage Server (ESS). This feature enhancement is applicable only to Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and automatically opens a Salesforce service ticket to report a hardware issue.