Proactive Tech Support Service

Overview

This guide explains the proactive tech support services offered by Avi Pulse. You can also configure proactive tech support action using alert action package.

Creating Proactive Tech-Support Cases

With proactive cases, Avi Controller will create a customer case whenever a critical even occurs in the system such as a SE failure or a Controller service failure. Avi Controller will automatically generate the relevant tech-support bundles and attach them to the created support case. This is all handled automatically with zero user intervention.

Once the opt-in is enabled for automated tech support, the Controller monitors those events. As and when that event is generated, the corresponding tech support flow is triggered.

tech-support-creation

The following are the opt-in events:

  • Auto Case Creation on System Failure

  • Auto Case Creation on SE Failure

For each opt-in there are corresponding alerts. The Avi Controller monitors SE-Down and Service-Fail events.

proactive-alert-config

You can view the proactive configuration by navigating to Operations > Alerts > Alert Config.

Proactive Case Creation Workflow

  • The Avi Controller monitors for the configured events/alerts. After the events occurs, the proactive case creation service creates a case.

  • Attaches the tech support/ core based on the failures.

Configuring Proactive Tech Support using Alerts

You can configure proactive tech support action using avi.alert.alert_automated_support alert action package as follows. This package uses the Avi python SDK for creating support cases, generating and attaching tech support and attaching latest core dump to the case.

  • You can use avi.alert.alert_automated_support package to call a single function and pass in a configuration object that determines the script workflow.

  • The configuration object will contain parameters like case severity, attach tech support (bool), attach core dump (bool), and attach a preferable tech support.

  • The alert action package exposes a single function create_case_attach_tech_support to be used by the user-provided control script.

  • You can use this user control script to create an alert configuration, wherein all intended events can be watched for. Once the control script is in place, the existing alert workflow takes care of generating the alert and executing the control script.

The following is the sample user control script:


#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
from avi.alert.alert_proactive_support import create_case_attach_tech_support
 
# valid options -
#   case_severity: one of 'Severity (1|2|3|4|5)',
#   attach_tech_support: boolean,
#   attach_core_dump: boolean
proactive_support_config = {
    'case_severity': 'Severity 2',
    'attach_tech_support': True,
    'attach_core_dump': True,
}
 
#pylint: disable=too-many-function-args
# Controller must be registered to Avi Pulse
create_case_attach_tech_support(proactive_support_config, *sys.argv)

There are some events which are pre-packed with the Controller. The pre-packed Controller will be with an alert configuration by the name System-SE-Failed-Proactive-Support attached to the Action Script for proactive support. The alert configuration will have CONTROLLER_SERVICE_FAILURE or SE_DOWN events.

You can create new alerts similar to the above alert configuration with different events.

For more information on alert actions, refer to Alert Actions guide.

Viewing Events for Debugging Proactive Tech Issues

You can view events for debugging proactive tech issues as follows:

proactive-alert-config