VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services that transform how enterprises build and operate modern applications. One of the VMware Tanzu services is App Modernization Technical Account Management (AMTAM). App Modernization TAMs establish a meaningful partnership with customers by understanding their environment, applications, challenges, and business objectives. AMTAMs partner with, enable, and advocate for customers to ensure continued success and maximum value realization from their Tanzu investments.
Identifying Opportunities for Improvement
Communication between AMTAMs and customers is key to success. Maintaining alignment on priorities and recognizing the challenges and potential areas of improvement are crucial for a strong and proactive partnership.
One of the areas in which AMTAMs help customers is proactive engagement through trend analysis and awareness. This may include analyzing ongoing issues and existing support tickets to identify problematic areas for improvement. For an identified area of concern, there are typically multiple solutions to consider including current resources, cross-organizational dynamics, historical practices, and more.
One of the challenges AMTAMs often observe customers facing is internal operational procedures. This is especially true when customers have large mission critical systems that are managed by a cross-geo team. This common scenario can result in a higher number of incidents translating into an even higher number of VMware Support tickets.
Expediting Issue Resolution
In one such situation within a large financial organization, a process solution was devised to suit the customer’s needs after careful review and consideration of their operational procedures. The customer has a significant Tanzu Application Service (TAS) implementation. TAS includes numerous components, which can be challenging when trying to identify if an issue is on the TAS platforms or with the applications running on them. The customer’s goal was and continues to be to minimize the number of tickets and expedite issue resolution.
A common question frequently asked by customers during an incident is whether the issue persists in the application or the platform. One way to identify this and to expedite resolution is to capture as much relevant data as possible by summarizing the issue in a well-defined and coherent manner when describing an issue and requesting assistance from the VMware team. Hence, AMTAMs encourage customers to proactively ask themselves questions and identify key elements around the following themes to better understand the incident.
- Problem Statement: Provide a basic description of the issue by including all the key points such as a clear description of the behavior, error encountered, components involved, context, environment details, severity and impact of the issue and the network topology.
- Problem Analysis: Investigate the situation by determining the degree, scope, and pattern of the problem so that practical troubleshooting steps can be applied to confirm and resolve the issue.
- Logs & Artifacts: Upload all the necessary snapshots, logs and failure messages to help confirm and troubleshoot the stated issue. Any item related to a specific issue should be uploaded to a Tanzu Support ticket.
- Recent Maintenances: List ANY recent changes like software or hardware upgrades, certificate updates, application enhancements, and new workloads which can have an impact on the environment.
Through this type of refined and structured problem assessment, issues can be resolved as quickly as possible. This approach the appropriate experts to be engaged for the specific component areas defined in the problem statement. This process can also help a customer identify areas where they may need additional assistance or enablement, thus leading to a training or enabling opportunity.
Tanzu Best Practices for Support Tickets
Taking time to ask a series of introspective questions can result in a reduction of support incidents and increased learnings over the period of time. This can also ultimately yield cost savings of customer resource time and energy as well as platform and application downtime. This approach also follows the Tanzu Support Best Practices for opening a new Tanzu Support ticket.
For additional information on the App Modernization Technical Account Management Service, please contact us here.
