Best Practices for creating a support ticket to LogPoint Support

Help us help you! In this article, you can find some of the best practices while opening a support request to ensure the fastest solution to your problems. While this list is far from exhaustive, in most cases, adherence to the points below will ensure that you get the best support possible.

One Issue - One Ticket Principle

While in the short term, it may be easier to deal with all issues on a single ticket, long-term wisdom recommends that you create one ticket per issue. This has the following advantages:

1. As one agent is assigned per ticket, creating separate tickets will help ensure that each issue progresses independently of the other.
2. Each ticket during its journey will encapsulate the entire history of the issue from its occurrence to its resolution.
3. Unnecessary clutter will be reduced on the ticket. Both you and our support personnel will know what issue is being talked about and dealt with.

Mention the priority of the issue

"All tickets are equal but some tickets are more equal than others"
Raising a ticket with the right priority ensures that issues that are truly urgent can be dealt with with the right expediency. You can refer to this page to assign the right priority for your support ticket.

Be as descriptive as possible

Writing a clear description helps avoid hours of back and forth communication between the Support personnel and you to get even the most basic information. The ticket description may include:

1. What is the issue that you are facing?
2. What possible steps have you tried? Have you visited our doc portal or community forums? If yes, please mention these and let the support personnel know how your case is different.
3. The Support IP to the system if available. A support IP enables our support personnel to access the LogPoint remotely so that neither you nor our support agent has to stay in lengthy support sessions to solve the issue. Please mention the expiry date for the Support IP as well. If a Support IP cannot be provided, please share your availability for a remote session.
4. A picture speaks more than a thousand words. A screenshot can often provide a much clearer description of the issue especially when this relates to some GUI issue.
5. In certain cases, we might also need some log files on the system. While attaching all log files is not feasible and it might not always be clear what log file to attach, sometimes there are some obvious candidates. For example, if alerts are not working, you might want to consider attaching log files to the `alert_engine`, `alert_dispatcher`, and the `premerger` services. The log file is located at:

   /opt/immune/var/log/service/<service_name>/current

6. For issues with normalization, we encourage you to include:
   1. Log Collection Method (syslog, csv, etc.)
   2. Manufacturer/Vendor
   3. Sample logs (can also be added as an attachment).

Follow-ups and Ticket History

If the issue you are currently facing is something that you have faced before, or if the ticket you are creating is in reply to another ticket that got closed automatically, it is recommended to either create a follow-up to the old ticket or mention the relevant ticket history. This might include the ticket number or even the name of the support personnel involved, in the subject line of the ticket itself. This will ensure that the same support agent gets assigned to the case and that the ticket can move forward without you having to provide the same information all over again.

Make sure you have checked out our documentation first

In some cases, the answers to your queries can be found in our documentation portal or in our community forums. So, make sure you check out the documentation, the Community Forums as well as our Knowledge Center. Here is what you will find in each of these:

1. Documentation Portal - How to configure/use guides for our products.
2. Community Forums - Forum for discussions on issues that our user community has faced.
3. Knowledge Center - Key insights from our Support Team regarding various products.