Scenario
Throughout the lifecycle of a Terraform Enterprise instance/application, maintenance may need to be performed for any number of reasons such as upgrading to the latest version of Terraform Enterprise. The Terraform Enterprise support team does not currently attend calls while the maintenance is underway, but is available to assist if an issue were to occur during the maintenance.
It does prove beneficial for the Terraform Enterprise support team to be made aware of upcoming maintenance so that the team can assist with preventing any possible issues, and have a reference of the maintenance plan for review. This allows the team member to begin troubleshooting as soon as possible.
Recommendation
In order for the Terraform Enterprise support team to be notified of an upcoming maintenance, it is best to open a proactive ticket to provide the team with the details of what will be performed during the planned maintenance. The support team will then review the plan, provide any feedback or suggestions, and reference this information in the event a new ticket is opened for an issue that occurs during the maintenance window.
Some useful information to the support team member regarding any upcoming performance would be:
- Date of planned maintenance
- Is Terraform Enterprise deployed on-prem or in a cloud provider, and which one if so?
- Terraform Enterprise Operation mode: I.e. External Services or Mounted Disk
- Have proper snapshots or backups of the Terraform Enterprise instance been conducted should it need to be recreated? If so, can details of the backup process be provided?
- Have proper backups of External Services such as PostgreSQL, Blob storage, and External Vault been performed if applicable
- Current TFE Version
- Targeted TFE Version
Any additional information related to the upcoming maintenance should be included in the ticket as well.
Once the support team member has reviewed the provided information, provided any feedback or suggestions, and answered any additional questions that may be presented the ticket will be marked closed.
If an issue does occur during the maintenance, new ticket(s) should then be opened, with reference back to the proactive/informational ticket, with specific details related to the issue that is occurring. Most times this will be a support bundle or any TRACE logs for failing Terraform runs. Proper priority should be assigned to the ticket(s) based to the impact that the issue is currently causing, and a support team member will assist accordingly.
Explanations of ticket priority are:
- Urgent - Any error reported by customer where the majority of the users for a particular part of the software are affected, the error has high visibility, there is no workaround, and it affects customer’s ability to perform its business.
- High - Any error reported by customer where the majority of the users for a particular part of the software are affected, the error has high visibility, a workaround is available; however, performance may be degraded or functions limited and it is affecting revenue.
- Normal - Any error reported by customer where the majority of the users for a particular part of the software are affected, the error has high visibility, a workaround is available; however, performance may be degraded or functions limited and it is NOT affecting revenue.
- Low - Any error reported by customer where a single user is severely affected or completely inoperable or a small percentage of users are moderately affected or partially inoperable and the error has limited business impact.
Please note that if multiple issues were to occur during the planned maintenance, it is beneficial to have separate tickets for each issue if they are unrelated, even if being worked by the same team member. This allows for better tracking of the issues, prevents an issue from being lost in another ticket thread.
Additional Information
- Tickets can be opened with the support team here: https://support.hashicorp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
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More information on support policies and procedures can be found here: https://www.hashicorp.com/technical-support-services-and-policies
- If additional levels of support are desired, a discussion with the organizations account team should be scheduled to discuss available options.