We’ve all been there. Your day has been going swimmingly– until suddenly – it’s not. Something’s gone wrong, your CIO is bearing down on you like his hair caught fire, and you need Support pronto.
Well, first up – we’re here to help. It’s a point of pride for us Support Geeks (and we know you love it too), that when you need to contact SolarWinds Support, you’re directly on to a Technical Engineer.
I’d like to briefly explain our support structure, give you a better understanding of what we do, how we can help you, and how you can get the best support experience. For full detailed information on our Support Team and your entitlements as a customer, please see our reference guide here: Support Information Document
So, who are we?
SolarWinds Support is made up of two teams:
| Customer Service | Technical Support |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds Customer Service is available to assist you with the general operation of your account, 24 hours a day, 5 days a week (Monday - Friday). | SolarWinds Technical Support is available to assist you with technical product issues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. |
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First off, there are two ways to contact Support – you can Call our Support Line, or you can submit an Online Support Ticket. We ask that you use your judgment here and reserve calls for when you have an urgent issue, or when your system is down. This in turn helps to keep the queue clearer – so when you do have an urgent issue or your system is down, we can get to you faster.
Speaking of case priorities – we allow for five different priority levels when you create a ticket with us, outlined in the table below. If you need to increase the ticket priority after submitting it, you can easily do so by responding to the case to let your Support Engineer know, by calling us, or by mailing TechnicalSupportFeedback@solarwinds.com where a Technical Support Manager will action your request.
| Priority | Business Impact |
|---|---|
| System Down | Product is nonfunctional and/or has unrecoverable service failure. Critical Business Impact. |
| Urgent | Product is functional but with major issues. Significant business impact. |
| High | Product is functional but with consistent issues or one product area is nonfunctional. Functionality is degraded. Some business impact. |
| Medium | Product is functional with minor or intermittent issues. Occasional functionality degradation. Minimal business impact. |
| Low | Product is functional with no apparent issues. Requests for upgrade documentation, feature requests, technical information, how to questions, product use questions. No business impact. |
Before opening a case with us, check out the wide range of self-help options we have available. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised by how quickly your issue gets resolved this way!
- Our Customer Resource Center has a lot of information available about common issues and queries for each product, video tutorials, troubleshooting tips and more.
- Many questions have already been answered or can be quickly solved with our Knowledge Base articles, and Product Documentation.
- Don’t forget the fine folks of Thwack, in particular, the Alert Lab and Report Lab denizens who are nothing short of logic gurus – no matter how awkward your alert or report requirements, they’ll probably have figured that logic out for someone else already.
Before you submit the ticket, please gather the following details for us, as it will help us to resolve your issue as quickly as possible:
- Clearly define the issue, providing symptoms, screenshots, how often the issue occurs, steps to reproduce the issue, any recent changes made, any steps you’re already tried when troubleshooting this yourself, and the business impact this has for you (if any). The more information you can provide, the faster we can get to the root cause - and to a solution.
- Provide environmental and product information, including the product version you are running, whether you are using multiple pollers or not, OS version, server details such as CPU & RAM, and any infrastructure details you believe may be relevant.
- For Orion products gather diagnostics and any other relevant logging (error details, memory dumps, trace files – whatever is relevant to that particular issue)
- To gather diagnostics, open SolarWinds Orion -> Documentation and Support -> Orion Diagnostics in the Start Menu. Click Start to kick it off, and it will produce a zip file.
- If you’re concerned that your issue could be environmental or permissions related, run the Orion Permission Checker tool as a Local Administrator – this checks a list of system folders to ensure the system accounts we’re using have the correct level of access. Click Check, and click Repair if you spot any failures.
- When you submit the ticket, you’ll get an automated email response with your ticket number. You can reply back to this to attach any small files to the case (<5MB), but anything larger, you’ll need to upload them to us:
- Open LeapFile and upload your file (or files), using your ticket number as the subject and support@solarwinds.net as the recipient.
- Ping an email through to your support ticket to let us know you’ve got files uploaded already for us – we’re not automatically notified. It will make your Support Engineer’s day.
Once you’ve submitted your case, you can check its status and update it from the Customer Portal. Log in, and click Support Cases, then ‘Review all Cases’ to view and update your ticket. You’ll also receive our responses to your case by email, directly to your inbox.