Sent to support functionality for error/issue diagnosis

Shaun shared this idea 7 years ago
Idea Logged

We have a large customer base that we support and are looking for ways to stream line our processes. One thing that has been identified is when one of our customers has an issue it is quiet hard to get the required information to diagnose the problem. Not all customers a technical minded.


An option with in the interface to send information to our support team would be very beneficial.


In the scenario where a customer was getting an error from a generated report, the "Sent to Support" function would be available and would gather the error, data source, customer information and any other required details to send to the support team. The customer would have the opportunity to add further comments before submitting.


Think of it as "Submit a crash report" functionality that you would find when an application crashes on Windows, Mac or Linux.

Best Answer
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Hi Shaun,


You are definitely not being selfish! You're just trying to help your clients as efficiently as possible.

Imagine a doctor coming to your house telling you that you were sick, and providing the antidote without you even realising you were sick. Oh ... actually that sounds kind of scary, lol.


At the moment, when Yellowfin crashes, you do have the option to email the Yellowfin Support Team, which will include a stack trace of the error.

However, the option is only on a crash report, so when you get an error and kicked out of your user session.


We do not have the option to email support or Yellowfin admin when encountering any other type of errors.

However, in saying this, as Lee mentioned, the problem isn't with the email, but rather grabbing the error message itself. This is something for everyone, not just ISV's.


See, with a crash report, the error is actually displayed on the local browser, so it's sent in an email, but any other type of error will only be logged in the Yellowfin log files, which could be anywhere.

So allowing Yellowfin to find, open and capture the error is near impossible unfortunately.


The best we can do, is improve the error visibility, so that the error itself is descriptive enough (without having to search through logs).

We do however have an enhancement to write an Admin tool to automatically grab the logs (#235150), though the task itself has yet to be planned.


Until a time when we can fully support this, you will need to notify users, that any error in the system is not normal behaviour and to notify yourself along with information on the issue itself.

You can then request the log files etc and pass them along to us for investigation, or possible search on our Forum/Community for known issues and get it resolved all on your own :)


Thanks for your suggestion, all feedback is reviewed and appreciated.

Please let us know if there was anything else you were after.


Regards,

David

Replies (3)

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1

Shaun,


This is a good idea and one that we have talked about in the past. What can cause problems is how Yellowfin is deployed within different environments, some configs allow broadcast outside their environment and some do not. However, we understand the situation you are in as it is a lot of work at times to pull the needed details from a client location to help address the end user situation. I will put this into the product idea queue for review by the team this month. We can discuss how this might we implemented for each environment to make it easier to gather and troubleshoot potential problems.


I will also offer this, if we can help with some additional training for your team we can schedule a session to go over the best practices for pulling logs, what to review to help isolate user versus system issues, and just help to provide an overview of the latest things our support team are using to solve requests.


Thanks again for the idea.


Lee

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Hi Lee,


In our scenario we are an ISV partner, so being a little be selfish, could it be a functionality only available as part of ISV licensing? Not sure if that will simplify or complicate things more. Will be interested in the teams thoughts on the idea.


Thanks for the offer of the additional training. I will speak to my team and see if they would like some additional training.


Thanks,


Shaun

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2

Hi Shaun,


You are definitely not being selfish! You're just trying to help your clients as efficiently as possible.

Imagine a doctor coming to your house telling you that you were sick, and providing the antidote without you even realising you were sick. Oh ... actually that sounds kind of scary, lol.


At the moment, when Yellowfin crashes, you do have the option to email the Yellowfin Support Team, which will include a stack trace of the error.

However, the option is only on a crash report, so when you get an error and kicked out of your user session.


We do not have the option to email support or Yellowfin admin when encountering any other type of errors.

However, in saying this, as Lee mentioned, the problem isn't with the email, but rather grabbing the error message itself. This is something for everyone, not just ISV's.


See, with a crash report, the error is actually displayed on the local browser, so it's sent in an email, but any other type of error will only be logged in the Yellowfin log files, which could be anywhere.

So allowing Yellowfin to find, open and capture the error is near impossible unfortunately.


The best we can do, is improve the error visibility, so that the error itself is descriptive enough (without having to search through logs).

We do however have an enhancement to write an Admin tool to automatically grab the logs (#235150), though the task itself has yet to be planned.


Until a time when we can fully support this, you will need to notify users, that any error in the system is not normal behaviour and to notify yourself along with information on the issue itself.

You can then request the log files etc and pass them along to us for investigation, or possible search on our Forum/Community for known issues and get it resolved all on your own :)


Thanks for your suggestion, all feedback is reviewed and appreciated.

Please let us know if there was anything else you were after.


Regards,

David

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