Supplying information to the IBM® Support Center

Your first contact with the IBM® Support Center will be with the call receipt operator, who will take initial details and put your problem on a queue. You will subsequently be contacted by a Support Center representative who will investigate your problem further.

The Support Center needs to know as much as possible about your problem, so have the information ready before making your first call. It is a good idea to enter the information on a problem description sheet, such as the one shown in Problem description sheet.

Here are two advantages of using a problem description sheet:
  • You will be communicating with the IBM® Support Center by telephone. With all your findings before you on a sheet of paper, you will be better prepared to respond to the questions that you might be asked.
  • You can maintain your own in-house tracking system to record and document all problems. This information can then be used for planning, organizing, communicating, and establishing priorities for controlling and resolving these problems.

When you contact the Support Center, you will need to give the operator the name of your organization and your access code or customer number. Your access code or customer number is a unique code authorizing you to use IBM® Software Services. You must provide this code each time you contact the Support Center. Using this information, the operator will access your customer profile, which contains your address, relevant contact names, telephone numbers, and details of the IBM® products at your installation.

The Support Center operator will ask you if this is a new problem or a call on an existing one. If it is new, you will be assigned a unique incident number. A problem management record (PMR) will be opened on the RETAIN® system where all activity associated with your problem will be recorded. The problem will remain open until it is resolved. Make a note of the incident number on your own problem reporting sheet. The Support Center will expect you to quote the incident number in all future calls connected with this problem.

If the problem is new to you, the operator will ask you for the source of the problem within your system software—that is, the program that seems to be the cause of the problem. As you are reading this book, it is likely that you have already identified IBM Z Workload Scheduler as the problem source. You will also have to give the IBM Z Workload Scheduler version, release, and maintenance level.

You will need to give a severity level for the problem. Severity levels can be 1, 2, or 3, and they have the following meanings:
Severity level 1
Indicates that you are unable to use IBM Z Workload Scheduler, resulting in a critical condition that needs immediate attention
Severity level 2
Indicates that you are able to use IBM Z Workload Scheduler, but that operation is severely restricted
Severity level 3
Indicates that you are able to use IBM Z Workload Scheduler with limited functions, but the problem is not critical to your overall operation.

When deciding the severity of the problem, take care neither to understate it nor to overstate it. The Support Center procedures depend on the severity level so that the most suitable use can be made of their skills and resources. Your problem will normally be dealt with immediately if it is severity level 1.

Finally, the call receipt operator will ask you for a brief description of the problem and might prompt you for keywords associated with the problem. The primary keywords are ABEND, ABENDU, DOC, INCORROUT, LOOP, MSG, PERFM, and WAIT, corresponding exactly to the problem classification types used later in this book. Strings containing other keywords are also useful. These are not predefined and might include such items as a message or message number, an abend code, any parameters known to be associated with the problem, or, for example, the name of a feature of IBM Z Workload Scheduler. The keywords will subsequently be used as search arguments on the RETAIN® database to see if your problem is a known one that has already been the subject of an authorized program analysis report (APAR).

You will not be asked for any more information at this stage. However, you should keep all the information relevant to the problem, including logs, dumps, and traces.