How to open a proactive case for patching or upgrading Red Hat CloudForms.

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat CloudForms

Issue

  • Upgrading production CloudForms
  • How to open a case to notify Red Hat of upgrades taking place so appropriate resources are available?
  • What information is useful for Red Hat support when opening a proactive ticket for a weekend or after hours work?

Resolution

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.

Prerequisites

  • The account must have an active Premium CloudForms subscription
  • 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.
    • 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: 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 Manager (CSM) - 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: Environment and any third-party software that was integrated, applications/services that may be affected, other components being upgraded, patches being applied, etc.
  • 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 an SOS Report of the relevant system/s 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.

Running into issues during the patch or upgrade
If any issues are found during the patching or upgrading of the CloudForms environment, proceed with:

  1. Open a support ticket addressing the issue while referencing the number of the Proactive Case.
  2. Report the new support ticket number in the Proactive Case opened.

Example of a Proactive Case

  • Case Title:
   [PROACTIVE] - CloudForms 5.10 to 5.11 upgrade
  • Case Description:
On Sunday, we are planning to upgrade our production CloudForms from version 5.10 to 5.11. All systems have 4 vCPUs and 16GB RAM. 

Environment details:
  1 Region
  1 Database appliance
  1 UI appliance
  3 Worker appliances
  1 RHV Provider
  500 VMs

Maintenance Window Information:
- Sunday, 22nd of July, from 08:00 am to 14:00 pm CEST (UTC+02:00), total duration of 6 hours.

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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