RTI Support Corner: Welcome to the new series!

First Published Friday, 15th June 2012 02:30 pm from Real-Time Innovations (RTI) : rtibobby

The opinions expressed by this blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone, this does not reflect the opinion of Automated Trader or any employee thereof. Automated Trader is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by this article.

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Welcome to the first of many blog postings from our

Support team. The Support team members are excited to begin this

new series which will give us an opportunity to informally

present common situations our customers face in addition to tips

and tricks that can help readers just starting out with RTI

Connext. The postings in this series are not meant to be as

detailed as our Solutions in our knowledge base but they will

contain enough information to be beneficial to the end user. If

you have any questions on what's presented in the postings,

please feel free to leave comments and we'll respond. If you have

an actual support question, please contact us directly using one

of the channels mentioned below.

For this

first posting, I'll explain what you get with a Maintenance and

Support (M&S) agreement, how to contact RTI Support and

how to get the most out of RTI Support.

So you purchased a Maintenance and Support

agreement. Now what?

Customers with

an active M&S agreement have access to RTI's support

staff and online customer portal.

Access to

RTI support staff includes:

Technical assistance on how to use the RTI Connext
products.
Assistance debugging distributed
systems using the RTI Connext products.
Advice on general implementation questions or
workarounds to known issues.
Assistance
installing and configuring of the RTI Connext

products.
RTI support phone line 9/6 PST and
09:00 - 18:00 UTC+1 Time (Madrid, Spain).
Email access to Support.

Access to the RTI Online Customer Portal

includes:

Online access through
the RTI Support portal for examples and solutions to common

problems.
Access to new and updated software
versions of the licensed RTI products.
Access to patches and engineering releases.
Searchable, Online documentation.
Case history, including open and closed
cases.

There are three ways to

get access to our support staff. The primary way is through the

online customer portal. Users can log into the portal at href="http://support.rti.com/">http://support.rti.com

to open a new case or view previous cases. When a support case is

submitted through the online portal, a member of the support team

will respond with a comment in the case. The user will receive an

email notification stating that there is a new comment in the

case and they will have to log in to review it. Users and support

team members can also attach files to a case, and the user will

have to log in to download the file.

The

second most common way to gain access to the support staff is via

our support email: href="mailto:support@rti.com">support@rti.com. When

an email is sent to our support alias, a new case is

automatically created in our case management system. Users can

an important difference between the portal method and the email

method of accessing support. When a case is created using the

email alias, the support team will respond to the user via email.

This gives the customer the flexibility to have communications be

through email or through the online portal, whichever they

prefer.

The third way to contact RTI Support

is through our support hotline. However, before I give out the

phone numbers I would like to mention that this year we

established a new Spanish Development Center (SDC) in Granada,

Spain. Not only will we have a development team at this new

location, we will also have a support staff which will help us

provide better global support coverage to our customers. We are

very excited about this and look forward to providing faster

response times to our EMEA and APAC customers.

Our support hotline is definitely the least used method

among the three. I believe this is because of the nature of the

problems customers face when using RTI Connext. It is very hard

to resolve issues on the phone since we usually have to spend

time researching past cases and creating reproducers. So when a

call comes in, our support staff will create a new case and

record as much information as possible.

The

phone numbers and hours of our support hotline are:

RTI Support - USA

(408) 990

7444

9am - 6pm Pacific Standard Time

hours

RTI Support - EMEA

+34 (958) 27 88 62

09:00 - 18:00 UTC+1 Time

(Madrid, Spain)

If for some reason a support

engineer is unavailable to answer the line, a caller will be able

to leave a voicemail. When leaving a voicemail, please include

the following: RTI Customer ID for the account; Named User; and

Case Number if calling about a current or previous

case.

Something important to consider when

contacting RTI Support: Regardless of which method is used to

contact support, the more information that is provided up front

the faster we can help to resolve the issue. We recommend that

the following information be provided with the initial case

submission:

Problem description:
- What's the problem?
- Any
  error/warning messages? Attaching an Error Log can be the
  
  simplest method of providing this information.
- Describe your scenario. How often does it happen? When
  does it happen (startup, steady state…)?
- Is it easy to reproduce? How is the problem reproduced?
  If possible, please provide a HelloWorld-style
  
  reproducer.
- If using the RTI monitoring
  library, attaching the log from RTI Monitor GUI can be
  
  useful.

Configuration description:
- Product
  Version number: e.g. RTI Connext 4.5f.
- Architecture on which the issue is occurring (e.g.
  i86Linux2.6gcc3.4.3).
- Programming language
  (e.g. C, C++, Java)
- QoS settings for your
  applications. Attaching your QoS XML configuration file, if you
  
  are using one, can be the simplest method of providing this
  
  information.
- IDL/Data types used.
- Description of your test environment (e.g. number of
  hosts and processes).
- Any special
  circumstances or configuration that you feel bears upon the
  
  problems you are experiencing.
- If the case
  is in regards to an RTI tool, please include XML configuration
  
  file for the tool.