Africa & Arabia ROC tutorial Model for L1-L2 user support based on x-GUS Mario Reale GARR - Italy ASREN-JUNET Grid School - 24 November 2011 Africa & Arabia ROC Tutorial

Contents Support Model for the Africa & Arabia ROC: – Workflow – Responsibilities – Support Units/Teams Ticket posting Ticket processing L2 support units Overview of x-GUS

Support model

Support Workflow 1/2 A Support Unit has been created in xGUS for each site Users or Site Admins post tickets using xGUS All tickets are immediately assigned to the L1 support team by the system Persons in the L1 Support Team are provided by all project’s partners – They are all included in the mailing list – which gets automatically notified of new L1 Support tries to debug and solve the issue. If not able to, assigns is further to – The Site Support Unit – The specific branch of the L2 support

Support Workflow 2/2 Tickets are solved by – Site Support units or – L2 Support Units or – L1 support Ticket is closed Set to be verified by users Users can – verify the ticket – reopen it if required

Responsibilites The L1 Support team is made by a set of experts shifting, committed by the partners (Ticket Process Managers) – So far, shifts have been organized in biweekly shifts – They are the responsible/accountable ones (TPMs) – But all L1 experts project-wise are notified by The Ticket Process Manager in shift is responsible for – Handling newly submitted tickets – Process pending tickets: Solicit/Hasten supporters to react What happens when for example a L2 support unit is not reacting ? Or a site ? – The TPM has to ask the assignee to react – The XGUS system can automatically remind assignee

Support Units L1 Support – Global pool project-wise, but TPMs shifting L2 Support Units according to the functionality Site Support Units if the problem is site specific Site Administrators are also responsible for posting site unavailability/maintenances to the XGUS system – notifying the admin/user community – Posting the maintenance in the News section of XGUS – Sending an to the WP3 and WP4 mailing list specifying the site name and unavailability time

Ticket Posting

Posting a ticket First verify that the same problem has not been posted already Specify required notification – On every change/On Solution Possibly add people in CC Describe the problem – input both: – Short description as a summary (useful information) – Detailed description of the problem Specify – Affected VO and { VO-specific on non-VO specific} (radio button) – Affected site – Required priority Possibly upload an attachment (max 2MB) Press “submit” button

Type of Problem

Affected Site

Posting a Site Maintenance/Unavailability

Ticket Processing (Providing Support)

Providing First Level (L1) Support You are notified by of the opening of a new ticket (everyone is notified, shifting Ticket Process Managers have to react ) Read the ticket carefully (including possible history) Try to solve the issue, ensuring first – That the user is not doing basic mistakes ( for example using the command in the wrong way) – That resources/services and data are there, reachable (for example not a scheduled downtime) – Using your know how to dig into the issue Requiring local support from the site/user when required – Try to understand if the problem is site-specific or not If you don’t manage to sort it out, escalate the issue assigning to the site support unit (if it is site-specific) or the second level support (if it is not site-specific)

Providing First Level (L1) Support Check pending (open) tickets and verify that people are working on them If a supporter/assignee (site, Level 2,..) has been silent for too long, ask her/him to react, acting on the pending tickets In some special cases tickets can be assigned to specific persons if required, or additional people can be involved

Assing a ticket to a site or to Level 2 support units

L2 support units

Current L2 support units SecurityCA SecurityVOMS Monitoring DataMgmtLFC DataMgmtDPM DataMgmtStorm JobMgmtWMS JobMgmtCE InfoSysBDII InfoSysGeneric Application Support

Current Membership

Membership and TPM duties We have created pool of persons for the L1 support belonging to EUMEDGRID-Support and SAGrid New L1 support members are welcome to join Also experts for the L2 support units are welcome to join the L2 support team Standard procedures/suggested tools for Ticket Process Managers on duty available from

Conclusions A well defined procedure to provide support to users and site administrators is in place for the Africa&Arabia ROC Based and the xGUS Support System – Well exploited and supported in the Grid domain – Kindly provided by the German Karlsruhe GGUS Team of KIT We currently have covered shifts until 31 Dec 2011 – If we want to still continuing providing support afterwards we need to identify manpower for this

xGUS The EGI Helpdesk Template Slides presented at the EGI Technical Forum Lyon – Sept 20, 2011 By Sabine Reißer, Helmut Dres, Günter Grein, GGUS TEAM KIT Karlsruhe

xGUS provides easy access to an own helpdesk system for NGIs or User Communities – GGUS interfaced – Administration (support units, problem types, etc.) via web – No local deployment/installation: Operation and maintenance at KIT What is xGUS? Technical Forum, Lyon

Attachments Ticket relations: Parent/Child, Master/Slave Duplicate tickets Ticket update and creation via mail Private Dashboard News module Statistics Some xGUS Features Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Information Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket History Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Submit Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Search Technical Forum, Lyon

Create maintenance announcement Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Modify (1) Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Modify (2) Technical Forum, Lyon

Ticket Modify (3) Technical Forum, Lyon

Statistics generator (1) Technical Forum, Lyon

Statistics generator (2) Technical Forum, Lyon

Portal administrators can customize via web Support Units Problem types VOs Sites Links on main page Links for support staff Portal colors Portal Administration Technical Forum, Lyon

Portal Administration Technical Forum, Lyon

xGUS Instances Technical Forum, Lyon helpdesk.aegis.rs xgus.ggus.eu/igalc xgus.ggus.eu/ngi_ch support.africa-grid.org helpdesk.ngi-de.eu

xGUS Homepage Technical Forum, Lyon Screenshots List of instances Test instance How to get an xGUS instance Information

Thanks for your attention! Technical Forum, Lyon