Improving the Support experience
Del.icio.usRemember thinking computers? How about all those diagnostic programs that promised so much and yet delivered so little? Yeah, I do too. So I was initially skeptical when I heard about the Novell Support Advisor. I’m not skeptical anymore.
One of the most frustrating things that support customers go through, is that first level of questions you go through. The support professional needs to do this to perform some very basic validation and to skip it creates a lot of risk down the line by “missing” some key point. We’re very fortunate that our customers are usually pretty diligent about doing pre-call checking but there’s always going to be the element of the support pro needing to gather a lot of configuration information and service validation.
For our SUSE Linux Enterprise and OES customers, we’ve turned that bumpy road into a highway. Any customer can download a copy of the Novell Support Advisor from our site and install it on their Linux or Windows client. The application uses Adobe’s Flex and Air systems to make the installation super simple and provides an elegant and snappy user interface to what you can of course do through terminal.
The tool once launched allows the user to probe the system for a variety of selectable service and functional options based on categories including connectivity, eDirectory, OES, Print, SLE, Update and Security. Each category contains multiple service “patterns” that the intelligent diagnostic looks at to make conclusions about the state of the service pattern. When the data is being gathered some load occurs over a Secure Shell connection to the queried device, but once the data is collected the connection is terminated so network and device load is minimized. The gathered data is consolidated into an easy to use view that lets the viewer and the support professional see quickly the state of the system. The tool can also be used to build history to see if things change over time and store that in the Analysis Archive. Because all the reports are archived, it’s easy to see changes over time and the simple red = critical, green = good dashboard makes information readily accessible
The client also talks to our own update servers to load pattern updates and new patterns, so value increases over time without a lot of admin time required. The user can select reporting on entire categories or select specific patterns from multiple categories providing enormous flexibility as well as the capability to cut to the chase when doing a problem diagnosis. If a problem is discovered where help is needed, a service request connection to the NCC can be opened.
Customers can download the tool at http://support.novell.com/advisor/ The tool was released on March 20th, so folks may not yet know about it.
It’s an excellent tool and I want to thank very much the developers for taking me through a quick demo recently. I encourage all readers to share with customers and prospects that Novell Support has raised the bar in the delivery of more rapid data gathering and diagnosis for Linux systems. The Novell Support Advisor is a real differentiator sure to benefit anyone who supports a Novell SUSE Linux or OES environment.
Until next time, peace.
Ross