A ticket is answered by an engineer, not a bot, and the first reply is fastest when it can already contain the fix. That depends on what you put in the ticket. This guide is short on purpose: where the form is, what each field does, and the five things that turn a two-day thread into a one-hour one.
Before you open one
Most of what people ask for is self-service and quicker than any reply: power cycle, remote console, reinstall, rescue mode, reverse DNS. For a network-wide problem check Status in the sidebar first; if we already know, the incident is there.
Open the ticket
- In the sidebar open Support → Open Ticket.
- Department: technical questions go to support; invoices and payments to billing; quotes and upgrades to sales. Picking the right one is the difference between an engineer reading it now and a hand-off later.
- Related server: pick the machine the ticket is about. The engineer then opens the ticket with the server's record next to it, and you do not have to type the address.
- Priority: Low for questions, Medium for anything that affects work, High when a service is degraded, Urgent when it is down. Use Urgent for outages only; it moves the ticket ahead of others and we would rather it stayed meaningful.
- Subject: hostname plus the symptom. “web1: no link on eth1 after bonding change” is a good subject. “Help” is not.
- Message: see the next section.
- Click Submit Ticket. You get a ticket number by email, and the thread is under Support from then on.
What to put in the message
Five things, in this order. A ticket with all five is usually solved in the first reply.
- Which machine: hostname and IP address, even when you picked it in the related-server field.
- What you expected and what happened instead, with the exact error text. Paste it; do not paraphrase it.
- When it started, with the time zone. We can read logs on our side around that moment.
- What you already tried, so we do not suggest it again.
- What you can see on the console if the machine is unreachable over the network. The remote console shows the screen a technician would otherwise walk to.
Leave out passwords. If we need access we ask for it in the ticket and tell you how to give it safely; a root password pasted into a message is a password to change afterwards.
After you send it
The ticket appears under Support with its status: Open until we reply, Answered when we have, Client Reply when the ball is back with us, and Closed when it is done. Replies also reach you by email, and you can answer from the thread in the portal, with attachments. When the problem is solved, close the ticket yourself or let it close after a few days without a reply. Afterwards you are asked to rate it; we read those.
How fast
We commit to a first response within an hour, around the clock. That response is from an engineer who has read the ticket; whether it is also the fix depends on the section above. Urgent tickets on a down service are looked at first.
Troubleshooting
- I cannot open a ticket. Your role does not include tickets, or the account has no email confirmed yet. The account holder can fix both under Account.
- I emailed instead of using the portal. That works too: mail to support@netrouting.com from the address on the account becomes a ticket. The portal form is better because of the related-server field.
- I want to add a colleague to the thread. Give them access to the account and they see the ticket; or forward the ticket email, which keeps the ticket number in the subject so their reply lands in the same thread.
- The ticket is closed but the problem is back. Reply to the same ticket; it reopens with its history, which is faster than starting over.