How to submit a Proactive Case [Primary Article]

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Introduction - what is a Proactive Case?

Proactive cases are a way for Premium customers to provide an advance notice to Red Hat Support of planned upgrades, migrations, patching, or any other maintenance activity. Typically, these events happen outside regular business hours.
Having prior knowledge of the planned activity provides Red Hat with an opportunity to ensure the right information is made available to better prepare technical support should you encounter an issue.

Note: New installations do not entitle a Proactive Case, as they do not fit with the Severity Level Definitions for Severity 1. For issues encountered during new installations, please open a regular Support Case.

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

  • The account must have active Premium subscriptions and entitlements for the relevant product.
  • It is recommended to submit Proactive Cases several days before the activity is scheduled to begin (preferably 7-14 days in advance), in order to allocate appropriate resources for the upcoming event. (Note. There may be different requirements for specific products, please use product-specific requirement as a source of truth when there is a conflict in requirements).
    • If the activity requires weekend coverage, the Proactive Case must be submitted at least 4 business days before the upcoming activity (by close of the business day, for example on the Tuesday prior to the upcoming activity). (Note. There may be different requirements for specific products, please use product-specific requirement as a source of truth when there is a conflict in requirements).
    • Note: Weekend Proactive Cases submitted less than 4 business days before the activity will be considered "Late Entry", and treated through normal Follow the Sun workflow. For such, Red Hat will not be able to guarantee that the appropriate resources would be staffed for the weekend.
  • In order to allocate the most appropriate engineer from different teams, no matter where they may be worldwide, Proactive Support Cases are conducted in the English language only.
  • It is recommended to familiarize yourself with the Reference Guide for Engaging with Red Hat Support article, which provides best practices for engaging Red Hat Support.
  • If you have a Technical Account Manager (TAM), a Solution Architect (SA), or a Customer Success Executive (CSE) - please engage them when planning a Proactive Case.

Opening a Proactive Support Case

First, prepare all relevant details for the upcoming event that will help communicate what changes and activities are taking place, then Open a This content is not included.Support Case and provide the required information in the following manner:

  • Case Title - should be prefixed with "[Proactive]" and should summarize the change.
  • Severity - open the case on a Severity level of 3. When the activity begins the Severity will be raised to 1 by Red Hat engineers so that the proper resources be allocated if an issue arises.
  • Case Description - describe as many details as possible, for example:
    • Type of activity planned
    • Current and Target Version for the upgrade, patches being applied, etc.
    • Environment, infrastructure, and any third-party software that was integrated
    • System/s involved in the activity
    • Applications, services and any other components that may be affected or upgraded during the activity
  • Date / Time of Event - state the planned start and end date/time of the maintenance window duration with the timezone (preferably referencing the offset from UTC).
  • Contact Information - provide the primary and secondary contact name, email addresses and phone number with country and region code. This is especially important if the person who opened the case is not the person doing the maintenance activity.
  • Data Attachments - upload the relevant data from the systems which will be affected by the activity. Refer to the next section for detailed data requirements per product.

Data to attach to the Proactive Case

In most RHEL-based products an SOS Report of the relevant system/s is needed before the activity is performed (preferably as soon as you open the case).
If there are only a few systems affected by the activity, please attach their respective SOS Reports to the case. Otherwise, please provide one or two as an example and keep the rest locally.

For other products which are not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we recommend you refer to the following required data sets, detailed per product (again, provide the data before the activity begins).
For your convenience, you can use the content table below to navigate to the relevant Red Hat product.

Example of a Proactive Case:

  • Case Title:

     [PROACTIVE] - RHEL 7 Kernel update

  • Case Description:

      Hello,
 
  We are planning to update a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 server from kernel version 3.10.0-514.6.2 to version 3.10.0-514.10.2. No other packages will be updated.
  This is a guest system installed on Red Hat Virtualization 4.0 and its service is a Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7, which is used by our production billing application.
  Due to the kernel update process, downtime was already planned to boot the system with the new one.

  Maintenance Window Information:
   - Date - Saturday, April 8, 2017
   - Time frame - 3 hours
   - Timezone - EDT (UTC-04:00)
   - Start Time - 20:00 UTC-04:00
   - End Time - 23:00 UTC-04:00
   - Rollback window - 1 hour
 
  Primary Contact Information:
   - Name: Jane Doe
   - Email: jane.doe@example.com
   - Phone: +1-123-456-7890
   
  Secondary Contact Information:
  - Name: John Doe
  - Email: john.doe@example.com
  - Phone: +1-123-456-7891

  • Case Attachments:

    sosreport-hostname-rhel7.tar.xz
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