Problem tickets

[Michael A. Lowry]

Update 2018.04.16: This matter is now irrelevant following the integration of Automic Support into CA Support. Incidents will now remain open until a permanent fix has been provided. Problem tickets will no longer be visible to customers.

 

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After some initial uncertainty, Automic has decided that problem tickets are the unambiguous and canonical customer-facing identifiers of software bugs. I am glad that a decision was finally made about this, but there are some areas for potential improvement.

 

1. It is still not possible to see, from an incident, to what problem ticket the incident is linked. (The other way around works fine.)

 

2. There is a conflict between problem ticket canonicalization and customer privacy. If two customers report the same problem, and both customers are subscribed to the same problem ticket, then the correspondence between Automic and one customer is visible to the other customer (in the case comments). This communication can include email addresses, serve names, and other potentially sensitive information. Automic should find a way to protect customer privacy while still preserving the idea of having a single and unambiguous problem ticket for each bug. Customers that wish to share publicly their experiences can do so here in the community.

 

3. When Automic has confirmed that a problem is due to a software bug, then as soon as possible, Automic Support should provide the customer with following pieces of information:

 

 

Item	Description
Problem ticket ID	If a problem ticket already exists or is created for this bug, what is its ID? (Also, make sure this problem ticket is accessible to the customer.)
Jira ticket ID	What is the internal Jira ticket ID of the bug? (May not be necessary, if the problem ticket uniquely identifies the bug.)
Problem description	What is not working? What is the expected behavior, and what is the actual behavior?
Work-around	What work-arounds, if any, exist for the problem?
Fix description	How will the fix work? That is, how will the program behave differently with the fix? Are there any configuration changes that are required to make the fix work correctly? Does the fix have any dependencies?
Scope of fix	What components must be updated to apply the fix? (E.g., Automation Engine, DB, User Interface)
Fix version	In what release, service pack, or hot fix will this bug be fixed?
Fix release date	When will this service pack be released? (If no release date is known, then provide an estimate of when a release date will be known.)

The above information should appear clearly at the top of the problem ticket. It should not be necessary to scroll down and read several pages of case comments to find this information.

 

4. Problem tickets should become automatically visible to all potentially affected customers. If a problem is known, customers should not have to each report it just to be able to find out that Automic already knows about it. The search function on the support site should be able to find all problem tickets relevant to the products for which the customer has a license. Obviously, the aforementioned problem with preserving customer privacy must be addressed first.

 

5. When a serious bug is found, Automic Support should also automatically notify all potentially affected customers, instead of simply waiting for customers to encounter and report the problem. We recently suffered a (thankfully brief) production outage due to a bug (PRB00119321) that Automic had known about for several months.

 

Note: Item #3 is based on a comment made in an earlier post.

[Michael A. Lowry]

There is still a conflict between problem ticket canonicalization and customer privacy.

Recently, Automic opted to change the default visibility setting for new entries added to problem tickets. Now, by default, updates to a problem ticket are not visible to customers — not even to the customer who reported the problem. Instead, all new updates to the problem ticket are visible only to Automic. Even if an Automic specialist uses the ticketing system to send an email to the customer, the corresponding update in the problem ticket is not visible to that customer. To make entries in a problem ticket visible to a customer, an Automic specialist must explicitly mark each update public. Needless to say, specialists often neglect to do this.

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to make an entries in a problem ticket visible only to one customer, but not to others. Entries are either private or public. This means that if more than one customer subscribes to the same problem ticket, then in order to preserve the privacy of each customer, the Automic specialist must go back and mark private all entries previously marked public.

It also means that once a problem ticket has more than one subscribing customer, the problem ticket is essentially useless as a means of communication between Automic and its customers. At that point, the only options are:

• Create a new problem ticket for each customer that is interested in the problem.
• Keep the original incident open, and handle all problem-related communication via the incident.
• Sacrifice customer privacy, and allow customers to see one another’s updates.
  

Each of these has disadvantages.

The obvious solution is to make it possible to control the visibility of individual entries in a more specific way:

• Private: visible only to Automic — internal communication between support and development.
  
• Public: visible to all subscribing customers — announcements about work-arounds, fixes, etc.
  
• Customer-specific: visible only to the customer to which it pertains — emails and files shared between Automic and a particular customer.
  

The visibility setting of an update should be determined by the type of update. Exchanges between support and development should be private. Email communications with a particular customer should be made visible to that customer only.

I hope it is possible to deliver this capability.

Ping: Mario_Tadros_1606

[Mario_Tadros_1606]

Hi Michael_Lowry
Our quality managers received your feedback and will include it in the continuous improvement plan for our internal problem management process. I will get back to you as soon as we have more details.

thank you for your precious inputs.
Mario

[Michael A. Lowry]

Mario_Tadros_1606:
I understand that Automic completed an upgrade of its Salesforce infrastructure over the weekend. Was any progress made on addressing the above problem?

[Michael A. Lowry]

This matter is now irrelevant following the integration of Automic Support into CA Support. Incidents will now remain open until a permanent fix has been provided. Problem tickets will no longer be visible to customers.