Fulfilling your responsibilities as a client
Reducing time to resolution on your support case
Advocating for case excellence

Fulfilling your responsibilities as a client

As a Pega client, you are responsible for fulfilling the following responsibilities in your partnership with Pega teams:

• Knowing your Pega deployments and applications
• Monitoring the performance of your on-premises Pega deployments and application using available tools and practices, as described in Monitoring the health of your system
• Monitoring the performance of your cloud services application deployments using available tools and practices, as described in Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud
• Performing support self-service, first on Pega Community and then on Pega Collaboration Center, as described in Support self service offerings
• Providing complete information about your support case, including the relevant supporting information (log files, screen captures, documents)
• Responding promptly to follow-up questions and requests from Pega engineers, as indicated in the [email protected] Client Handbook article Severity Levels and Response Times
• Allowing screen-sharing sessions with Pega engineers
• Keeping track of your support cases by viewing and downloading reports of the cases, using the Export to Excel feature in My Support Portal 
• Managing your Pega account users of My Support Portal and their roles in a timely manner, as prescribed in Account Administration

Reducing time to resolution on your support case

As a Pega client, you can help reduce the time it takes to resolve your support case by submitting a concise and complete support request, especially for Incidents (INCs):

• Attach your system specification to your support case.
• Identify dependencies between your support case (the INC) and your project milestones so that we understand the urgency of your request.
• Choose the Severity and the Business Impact of your case. From the combination of these two values, the support team determines the Priority of your case.
• Describe the impact of your support case (INC) on your enterprise’s or team’s critical milestones (project milestones, Development-to-UAT, Staging-to-Production, Alpha or Beta tests, Upgrade schedule, GoLive date).
• Identify the frequency and times that the issue occurred.
• Attach the relevant supporting information to your support case: log files (PegaRULES log, Alert logs, PDC and AES logs), screen captures, documents, tracer results, and so on.
• Supplement PDC or AES log information with performance context and measurements, for example:
  • What is the context of the performance degradation? When does performance slow down?
  • What specifically is slow?
  • What indicators have you identified to quantify slow performance? (Logs, alerts, PAL, Tracer, and so on)

See System Performance landing page and Tracer disk usage FAQ.

• Provide a list of your system’s installed hotfixes (by using the System Scan).
• Identify the Steps to Reproduce the problem in a document with text and screen captures.
• Include the diagnostic analysis and troubleshooting activities that you performed prior to reporting the problem.
• Offer your own Root Cause Analysis (RCA) that you performed prior to submitting your INC.
• Where custom properties and rules are involved, provide as much insight into these instances as possible.

Advocating for case excellence

Know how and when to assist the Pega team in complying with their standards for case excellence:

• Ensure that your action items requested by the support team member are delivered.
• Ask for clarification when the actions requested of you by the support team are unclear.
• Ensure that the support team member has set clear expectations for when your actions should be delivered.
• Communicate any concerns about meeting expected action dates.
• Hold the support engineer or team accountable for specifying their own action items and when to expect them.
• Understand when updates should be expected based on case severity:
  • Avoid pushing for updates or escalating cases before the defined communication SLAs, but…
  • Hold the support engineer accountable for providing these updates when the communication SLA deadlines are missed.