IBM Power: An overview of the IBM Remote Technical Support Process.

Question & Answer

Question

When IBM clients opens a support cases, the IBM Report Technical Support teams strive to make the IBM Support experience simple, seamless, and effective within the guidelines per the IBM Support Guide.

Below are common questions and answers clients may have while working with the IBM Remote Technical Support teams:

How IBM works on the Severity of case?

Severity	Business impact	Details
1	Critical	System or Service Down Business critical functionality is inoperable or a critical interface has failed. This usually applies to a production environment and indicates an inability to access products or services resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate solution. Note: We will work with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week to resolve Severity 1 problems provided you have a technical resource available to work during those hours. You must reasonably assist IBM with any problem diagnosis and resolution. For IBM Cloud services, you must log a Service Down case within 24 hours of first becoming aware that there is a critical business impact and the Cloud service is not available.
2	Significant	A product, service, business feature, or function of the product or service is severely restricted in its use, or you are in jeopardy of missing business deadlines.
3	Some	The product, service or functionality is usable and the issue does not represent a significant impact on operations.
4	Minimal	An inquiry or non-technical request.

What is IBM policy for receiving a follow-up response for a case?

First, it is important to understand there is a difference between the response time after you contact IBM, the response time while your support case is actively being work (e.g., follow up responses), and resolution to your case.

Per your IBM support contract, when you contact IBM, the documented responses time are listed in the IBM Support Guide:
IBM Support Guide

IBM strives to keep clients up to date on the status of their support cases that includes current actions and next steps through the progression of activities. Because each client, each environment, and situation is unique, there are too many unpredictable circumstances that can influence when meaningful follow-up updates can be provided. Although there are no contractual or documented responses times for providing status updates, IBM will make every effort to keep clients informed as actions occur or changes in status become available.

The recommendation is that when/If you have a pending deadline or you have specific work time constraints, communicate your situation to your support agent early in your case to help establish the awareness of the situation and an understanding when getting updates would be helpful.

Why does IBM keep asking for data?

Most modern computer environments consist of many connected computing, network, and storage devices, creating extremely complex solutions or infrastructures. This complexity exists whether these devices are provided by one vendor or multiple vendors. Complex issues occur when one or more microsecond events occur within a sequence of million events based on client's unique business workload being processed through these client custom configured and multiple layers of connected devices. For performance reasons, all debug and tracing features can not be enabled across all the connected devices in order to capture any, or all, microsecond events that may trigger a specific issue. There are an infinite number of possible execution paths across all connected devices trying to service unique client workload to implement a complete or comprehensive hooks into all products. Therefore, the default data collection procedures are not likely to capture one of these microsecond events (which likely occurred before the data collection) and simply display a nice message such as "PROBLEM OCCURRED HERE".

For these reasons, the IBM approach has been, and will continue to be:

Get an accurate problem description or impact to the business and get a complete and accurate details of any recent changes to the configuration, the environment, the infrastructure, and workload. This information will help the support team to isolate the focus to specific products and/or specific features in the products. Many initial delays are contributed to clients not providing accurate or complete details when the case is first opened.
Review the initial data collection to understand if the problem may be related to a known defect, to understand the configuration and understand if the configuration could be a contributing factor and review recent error messages. In some situations, the problem can be identified from the initial set of data. In more complex situations, the initial data will provide background information and help to further identify how to implement a targeted data collection. Many delays are contributed to clients not uploading the correct data, uploading more than the requested data, uploading data other than the requested data, and uploading incomplete data, or uploading data after a significant amount of time after the event occurred (for example, capturing data after having rebooted a system).
For complex issues, performance issues, in-frequent issues, time-out issues, data corruption issues, clients should expect multiple data collections (when the issue does occur) will be required and will be requested by IBM Remote Technical Support. This is required further isolate and drill into specific areas of the features and code associated with the microsecond events leading up to the issue.

How does IBM differentiate problem solution and root cause analysis (RCA)?

As documented in the IBM Support Guide, IBM Remote Technical Support is here to help with short duration problems and identify known or new defects.

In situations where clients request root cause analysis once the solution has been provided, customers should review and understand what to expect when requesting RCA:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6595181

What is IBM policy for requesting a live call for a case?

As a courtesy to all IBM customers, IBM Remote Technical Support will reply to live call requests based on:

In the order requests are received,
Based on the severity of the business impact (e.g., getting a production system back to an operational state).
The availability of a Subject Matter Expert (SME) with the technical skills being requested for the technical issue.
When requested data has been provided, and the SME has had adequate time to review the data.
When customer can ensure all of their knowledgeable staff (system admins, network admins, storage admins, etc) are available to participate in the call and have authority to run commands and make necessary changes.

For more details on working with IBM Remote Support teams to request live calls, please review this article

(https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7160989)

How do I give awareness that additional attention is needed for my case?

There are different scenarios that a client may want to bring awareness that additional attention is needed, such as:

There is an urgent or pending deadline or milestone
The business impact was not correctly communicated and needs to be updated.
The need to reach a support agent before the contractual and published response times
Communication and documentation issues occurring with the support case

When then situations occur, clients are bring additional awareness of their cases by

For premium contract customers, contact your IBM premium Technical Account Manager (TAM)
Click the Escalation button
Contact a duty manager (DM)

Why does IBM support direct me to IBM services for my support cases?

As documented in the IBM Support Guide, IBM Remote Technical Support is here to help with short duration problems and identify known or new defects.

When clients request assistance for activities that are beyond the scope for what is documented in the IBM Support Guide and your support contracts, clients will be directed to contact an IBM services team or a IBM Business Partner.

For examples of what may be beyond the scope for IBM support, view this web page:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7029780

What can I expect when I attempt to get support for end of support products?

Running systems and applications with current and "in service" levels is critical to maintaining a healthy business infrastructure.

IBM provides customers various fee based supports to support the entire life cycle of products.

Standard support contracts entitle clients to receive support for "in service" product levels.
Service extension contracts entitle clients to receive support for products are past their normal "in service" product dates.
TLS Accelerated Value Program (AVP) allows clients to get support for "end of life" products that are no longer eligible for support through standard support and service extension contracts.

The following articles provide more details on what to expect when using out of service product levels:

IBM Power: What to expect when contacting IBM Support for "End of Service" product versions (applies to AIX, HMC, IBM i, PowerHA, PowerVM, Power Systems)
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6492481

IBM Power Software (AIX, Virtual HMC (vHMC), IBM i, PowerHA, PowerVM): Why clients should keep their application, operating system, and firmware components updated to current release levels
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6595041

What do I need to do if I need support in a specific language?

Per the IBM Support Guide, for severity 1 cases, clients may be requested to communicate in English.

For details about requesting assistance in a preferred language, please read this article;
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7029632

What can I expect if my business or country has specific citizenship or data access requirements?

Standard IBM Remote Technical Support does not include provisions specific to providing support based on specific citizenship requirements.

In our age of heightened security, IBM understands clients secure business requirements. If you have a secure business requirement, you should contact and work with your local IBM account team to identify options IBM can provide for your business.

When you open a case to the standard IBM Remote Technical Support team, you can request a special citizenship requirement, and we will do our best to accommodate that request.

For some situations, accommodating this special request may result in working the situation at a lower severity and until staff meeting the requirement becomes available. In urgent situations when IBM is unable to accommodate the request due current staff availability, IBM will request an exception for your scenario or refer you to an IBM services team.

What is IBM's Strategy and philosophy?

IBM's strategy is to provide world class support with personalized attention, along with bringing evolving our tools and processes to provide simple, yet secure support experience.

Simplify your experience with IBM Support
Improve our interactions with you
Deliver value to you from expanded insights

Our philosophy is to help you succeed through partnership, innovation and honesty. We aspire to reflect these traits with every interaction:

"Advocacy" we're your partners; your success is our success.
"Quality" we employ industry-leading skills to provide you with efficient and innovative solutions.
"Trust" we're open and honest, acting with your best interest in mind.

Working with IBM Support ...
Using IBM Services ...

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