Information to include in a Support ticket

To troubleshoot and investigate a Support ticket in an efficient and effective manner, the WPVIP Support team needs to fully understand the scope, nature, and context of a request. If the initial request in a ticket does not provide sufficient information, the amount of time required to communicate and resolve the issue will increase.

When creating a Support ticket, provide as many of the details listed below as possible that are relevant to the issue.

Essential information

The WPVIP Support team requires most if not all of the information listed below to proceed with an investigation:

• The domain name(s) that correspond to the WPVIP Platform environment affected.
• Exact URLs that are affected. These could be front-end URLs, WordPress admin URLs, or both.
• Steps to replicate the issue. This is very important so that Support can start analyzing the problem right away.
• Description of issue + supporting screenshots, error messages, and support details if applicable.
• Describe the expected behavior.
• Describe how the actual behavior differs from the expectation in as much detail as possible.
• What time (in UTC) did the issue(s) occur?
• What is the overall impact of the issue, and/or the number of users that are affected?

Information for debugging issues

If assistance is requested for debugging an issue, the Support team will need most if not all of the following information:

• Outline the steps that have been taken to investigate this issue so far.
• Describe any observations or theories that have been determined from reviewing:
  • New Relic
  • Query Monitor
  • A browser’s developer tools, including browser errors and response headers
• Report if the site down for everyone, or just one person.
• Investigate if advertisements or other third-party content can be identified as a possible source of the problem and report all findings.
• Have the developers on the team attempt to replicate the issue on a non-production environment and report on the results.
• If the issue is related to Google Search Console and Crawl Stats, attach a full screenshot of all panels in the site’s Crawl Stats report.

Additional information

Depending on the type of issue, providing some of the following information in a Support ticket can also be helpful for the WPVIP team to quickly and effectively provide assistance:

• On which network are the affected users? (e.g. office, home, mobile)
• On which browser(s) is the issue appearing?
• If one user is affected, what is the user’s source IP? 
• If only a few users (less than 5) are affected, what are the WordPress usernames of the affected users?
• Have there been recent deployments?
• Have there been network changes on the customer side? (e.g. DNS if applicable or internal network changes)
• Provide a traceroute and HTTP headers.
• Provide a HAR file for failing or problematic requests.
• Provide a screen share or videos demonstrating the issue.

• If a site has a reverse proxy such as Akamai, can the issue be reproduced when requests bypass the reverse proxy and are sent directly to the Automattic Anycast IP address by editing the local hosts file? 
• If a decoupled architecture is used, has it been determined that the front-end application is not causing the issue?
• Have there been any caching changes? (e.g. modifications to cache-control headers)