High quality initial incident reporting can considerably shorten the time that it takes to a get to a solution. A high quality incident should have:
- An accurate short description of the symptom
- A long description that is full and complete, and covers the circumstances and context of the failure
- As much context and detail as possible. If you are unsure whether it is relevant, provide it anyway
- Important details such as chronology, symptoms, configuration, workload levels and third party software involved
Always include relevant diagnostics on the initial report. A good set of diagnostics is:
- Uploaded to the
Micro Focus ftp site or attached to the incident (see the topic
Naming Conventions for Diagnostic Collection)
- Complete – includes traces, dumps, console and other relevant logs
- From the same failure – submitting a console log from Tuesday, a trace from Wednesday and a dump from Thursday does not help as none of the process numbers or details will match
- Inclusive of specific failure details (probably in the long description) with particular attention to the date/time of the failure, when it started, what symptoms it demonstrated, whether it recovered or required manual intervention
If you believe that a problem reoccurs on a system:
- Always capture a new set of diagnostics – multiple sets may help us see ‘patterns’
- Update the existing incident number that the problem was reported on
- Add comments to the incident detailing the date/time of the new failure, why you think it is a reoccurrence of the same problem, and as much other context on this new failure as possible, including the similarity with previous failures
- Supply the diagnostics to
Micro Focus using the naming convention for the diagnostics collections and/or other files detailed in the next topic
