How to Get the Most from Engine Yard Support

Support Options

We try to be accessible and approachable in as many different ways as
possible—a ticketing system, a toll-free support phone number, IRC, our
status blog, forums, your personal Account Manager, and regular customer
conference calls. Naturally, these options vary in their effectiveness and
utility in certain situations, and we prefer to use the most appropriate
method for each case.

The Ticketing System

In general, the best option for most technical enquiries, work requests, and other things you’d expect from a Support department is our ticketing system, at http://engineyard.helpserve.com. This system can show you your company’s ticket history, currently open tickets, and allow you to open new tickets and add replies to existing tickets. If you reply to a resolved ticket it will reopen the ticket, so the ticket will appear in our worklists again.

If you need to add more people to your ticketing system account, please lodge a support ticket. We’ll need to know the full name and e-mail address of the user you want to add. Each user’s e-mail address must be unique.

If for some reason you don’t have a login to our ticketing system, or the password has been lost, you should e-mail ticketing@engineyard.com and one of our Support Admin staff will fix things up for you.

When you need urgent support, the ticketing system may seem like the last place you want to spend your time. However, please consider lodging a ticket with a detailed description of the problem, and then contacting us via IRC or phone to follow up. That way we’ve already got somewhere to record the status of the issue, and provide questions and comments.

IRC

When you need an answer and you need it now, or if you need to discuss an issue rather than just requesting an outcome, a support ticket isn’t the best way to go. Instead, we use our real-time support options: IRC and the old fashioned telephone.

Our IRC channel is #engineyard on the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net). Anyone in that channel who is an operator (usually identified in the channel’s user list with some sort of marker or “@” symbol) is an Engine Yard employee, to differentiate them from the other customers who like to hang around in the channel. Please remember that the channel is a semi-public place, and anything you say in there can be seen (and possibly logged) by anyone in the channel, so don’t drop any company secrets.

All our on-call support staff have their IRC clients configured to alert them to the word “eyhelp”, so make sure you include that in your initial message to get everyone’s attention. Please do not PM (private message) individual staff members with help requests—if that person is not on-shift, or is busy helping someone else, they may not be able to assist you quickly.

When you join the channel, give a brief description of your problem, including the word “eyhelp”, and someone will respond quickly (usually within seconds). Ticket IDs, (short) error messages, and your customer name or slice ID are great things to list in your initial message, as it saves us time in asking for them or otherwise determining your problem. Describing the problem up-front also allows the most relevant member of staff to respond to your request immediately (we have separate specialist sysadmin, DBA, and app support groups).

If your problem is likely to take a bit of discussion to resolve, or if sensitive details may need to be discussed, we’ll ask you to join a separate channel. This is also handy if you want to have several of your people in the discussion and several of our people all together. Feel free to create an appropriate channel in advance if you’d prefer, and add a request to join that channel in your initial message.

Telephone

Our toll-free emergency support numbers are:

• US: +1-866-518-9275
• UK: +44 800 0234 795

Calling either of those numbers will route you direct to our on-call support people. In rare circumstances, all the on-call people may be already busy, and you may be asked to leave a voice mail. In that voice mail, please clearly state your name, your customer name, the nature of your problem (including a ticket ID if you’ve lodged a ticket) and a number on which we can call you back. We call back every voice mail we receive, including blank voice mails, as soon as we possibly can.

Please only use the support line when you need emergency assistance. Routine support requests can be handled much better via a ticket lodged in our ticketing system, where we can immediately get the right person involved in answering your query.

The Status Blog

When a large-scale problem is affecting multiple customers, or we are performing a maintenance, we will post to the Engine Yard Status Blog. This allows everyone to keep up to date with what’s happening on an issue, without needing to individually update every customer (which, as you can imagine, can be quite tricky if there’s a large problem). If there’s a widespread problem that is effecting your site, we may ask you to follow the status blog. If the blog isn’t answering your questions, however, please feel free to ask in the IRC channel, or contact your Account Manager.

Engine Yard Forums

If you’d like the opinion of both Engine Yard staff and other customers, then why not give our forums a go, at http://forum.engineyard.com/. This is an open resource, available for anyone to read and post to, so you shouldn’t post any confidential or private information here.

The main benefit of the forum is to harness the knowledge and experience of our other customers, both in the hosting service itself and the wider issues with Ruby, Rails, and the other technologies that we support. Engine Yard staff also monitor the forums, however the advice we give on the forums will, for customer confidentiality reasons, be of a general nature, and if you need help with particular problems on your slices we recommend that you lodge a support ticket instead.

Your Account Manager

Every Engine Yard customer, regardless of their size, has an account manager allocated to them, usually assigned by geographic region. These hardworking stalwarts are your advocate within the company—your special insider, if you will. They’re all technically savvy, but their main knowledge is how we work as a company, and who within the company is most capable of handling your problems.

If you have a request that is particularly complicated, or perhaps you need a conference call with an engineer to work out the details before you’re quite ready to lodge a ticket, then your account manager is the best person to get in contact with — they’ll be able to help you out and direct the company’s resources to best suit your needs. Also, if you’re in any way dissatisfied with your Engine Yard hosting, please get in contact with your account manager immediately so that they can discuss the problem and resolve it.

As we’ve only recently introduced dedicated account managers, you may not know who your account manager is. If that’s the case, just get in contact with the Support department and they’ll give you the appropriate details.

Customer Conference Calls

Each week we hold conference calls for our US and European customers, to allow both customers and staff to interact, ask questions, get updates on larger issues, and generally get to know each other better.

The US conference calls are held each Thursday, at 10am Pacific time (UTC-7 or UTC-8, depending on daylight saving). The dial-in number is:

• 866 518 9277 (toll-free, US & Canada only)
• +1 712 580 0380 (international)
• Access code: 105 4946 #
  
  Our European conference call is on Wednesday, at 10am GMT. The dial-in number is:

• 0844 848 5959 (UK lo-call number)
• +44 870 834 7272 (international)
• Room number: 19293 #

Working Efficiently with Support

To help you get the most out of your support experience, and to make sure we resolve your problem as quickly as possible, we’ve put together a list of tips that will help us to help you.

Log a Ticket

In almost every case, we can give you the best service if there is a ticket in our ticketing system relating to your request. Even in an emergency situation, taking a couple of minutes to create a ticket that contains some basic details about the problem is time well spent. We can keep the ticket updated with our progress and investigations, which acts as both a status update for you, and a log of work performed. If we need to put multiple people onto your issue, or transition work to another staff member, the ticket log is a good way to quickly bring them up to date.

In most cases, if you haven’t already created a ticket, we will create one for you and give you the ticket ID for your reference. You can view the ticket’s status and history at any time through our ticketing system.

If you’re contacting us via IRC, it is a great help to us if you can put the relevant ticket ID into your initial message—we can lookup the ticket and get a handle on what’s going on almost immediately, and this will save valuable minutes.

What to put in a new ticket

When you’re creating a ticket, it’s important to put in plenty of details so that we can get in and fix the problem immediately, rather than having to ask you a series of questions before we can get to work.

If you’re reporting a fault of some sort and need us to investigate and resolve the problem, there are three things we have to know: how to reproduce the fault, what exactly happened that was wrong, and what you expected to see. If we can’t reproduce the problem or see what’s wrong, we’ll have a hard time finding where the problem is, and without knowing what’s supposed to happen, we’ll have no idea when it’s fixed. Remember to include login information or any other “preparation” steps that will need to be done before we can see the problem.

On the other hand, if you’re requesting some work to be done, or just asking a question, then things are a bit more fluid, and a lot depends on exactly what you’re asking for. The important thing to remember, really, is that we’ve got a lot of customers and it’s best not to assume that someone who is intimately familiar with your environment and history will be dealing with your ticket. We do our best to be familiar with your setup before working on a ticket, but detailed history and “gotchas” can be a problem. If there’s relevant previous tickets, please refer to them, and include enough detail in your request so that we’ve got a reasonable starting point for investigations.

Finally, if you’re requesting additional slices, then please let us know:

• Which environment you’d like the new slice(s) to join (or if they should be in a new environment);
• How many slices you’d like;
• What resources they should have (RAM/CPU);
• If you’d like their root filesystems “cloned” (an rsync copy of nearly everything) from an existing slice, and if so, which slice they should be cloned from;
• When a good time to do an environment reboot would be.
  
  All of this seems like a lot of info to absorb, but don’t get too stressed if you can’t put every last detail into a ticket right from the get-go. If your ticket is missing anything, there’ll just be a short delay while we ask for the missing information.

Put Separate Issues in Separate Tickets

When you’ve got lots of things that need to be discussed or fixed, it’s tempting to just open one ticket and list them all. The problem with that approach is that not all of your issues will necessarily be easy to fix, and it might take some time to get everything done. The comments and questions that fly back and forth quickly obscure the full list of issues that needed to be addressed, and in this state it is almost guaranteed that something will be missed, leading to delayed resolution and frustration all around.

So, if you’ve got multiple things that need fixing, please put them in separate tickets. Also, if an issue is resolved, please don’t throw a new problem into the old ticket.

Pick the right priority

This is more of a courtesy to other customers than a hard-and-fast rule of dealing with the support department: please don’t inflate the priority of your tickets unnecessarily. We use the priority to assist us in triaging new tickets and choosing which ticket to work from the pile first. Even Low priority tickets usually get attention within a few hours, but we will look at High priority tickets first. Urgent and Emergency are for stuff that needs to get done now (you’re waiting on the work to get done to do a new deploy that your customer is screaming for) or you’re currently experiencing downtime. If you pick a high priority for all your tickets, even those that are asking a non-time-critical question, then you’re just making things harder for other customers who do have time-critical work that needs doing.

Timezones!

We’ve got support staff all over the planet, and our customers are fairly spread out too. Whenever you’re specifying a time to get something done (like a maintenance window), please include a timezone. Most of our customer base is in the US, so we usually assume a US timezone on requests, but even then it’s: “which timezone?”. Giving a timezone is especially important if you’re scheduling a call with our team, as the last thing you (and we) want is to wake you up in the early hours of the morning with a phone call because we didn’t realize you were in a part of the world other than where we thought you were.