IBM Software Support provides assistance with product defects.
Before you begin
Before contacting IBM Software Support, your company must have
an active IBM software maintenance contract, and you must be authorized to
submit problems to IBM. The type of software maintenance contract that you
need depends on the type of product you have:
- For IBM distributed software products (including, but not limited to, Tivoli®, Lotus®,
and Rational® products,
as well as DB2® and WebSphere® products
that run on Windows® or UNIX® operating systems), enroll in Passport
Advantage® in one of the following ways:
- Online: Go to the Passport Advantage Web page and click How to Enroll.
- By phone: For the phone number to call in your country, go to the
contacts page of the IBM Software Support Handbook on the Web and click the
name of your geographic region.
- For IBM eServer™ software
products (including, but not limited to, DB2 and WebSphere products that run
in zSeries®, pSeries®,
and iSeries™ environments),
you can purchase a software maintenance agreement by working directly with
an IBM sales representative or an IBM Business Partner. For more information
about support for eServer software products, go to the IBM
Technical Support Advantage Web page.
If you are not sure what type of software maintenance contract you
need, call 1-800-IBMSERV (1-800-426-7378) in the United States or, from other
countries, go to the contacts page of the IBM Software Support Handbook on the Web and click
the name of your geographic region for phone numbers of people who provide
support for your location.
Why and when to perform this task
To contact IBM Software support, follow these steps:
- Determine the business impact of your problem.
- Describe your problem and gather background information.
- Submit your problem to IBM Software Support.
Steps for this task
- Determine the business impact of your problem. When you report
a problem to IBM, you will be asked to supply a severity level. Therefore,
you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are
reporting. Use the following criteria:
Severity |
Description |
Severity 1 |
Critical business impact: You are unable to use the program,
resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate
solution. |
Severity 2 |
Significant business impact: The program is usable but
is severely limited. |
Severity 3 |
Some business impact: The program is usable with less significant
features (not critical to operations) unavailable. |
Severity 4 |
Minimal business impact: The problem causes little impact
on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem has been implemented. |
- Describe your problem and gather background information. When explaining a problem to IBM, be as specific as possible. Include
all relevant background information so that IBM Software Support specialists
can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers
to these questions:
- What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
- Do you have logs, traces, and messages that are related to the problem
symptoms? IBM Software Support is likely to ask for this information.
- Can the problem be recreated? If so, what steps led to the failure?
- Have any changes been made to the system? (For example, hardware, operating
system, networking software, and so on.)
- Are you currently using a workaround for this problem? If so, please be
prepared to explain it when you report the problem.
- Submit your problem to IBM Software Support. You can
submit your problem in one of two ways:
- Online: Go to the Submit and track problems page on the IBM
Software Support site. Enter your information into the appropriate
problem submission tool.
- By phone: For the phone number to call in your country, go to the
contacts page of the IBM Software Support Handbook on the Web and click
the name of your geographic region.
Result
If the problem you submit is for a software defect or for missing
or inaccurate documentation, IBM Software Support will create an Authorized
Program Analysis Report (APAR). The APAR describes the problem in detail.
What to do next
Whenever possible, IBM Software Support will provide a workaround
for you to implement until the APAR is resolved and a fix is delivered. IBM
publishes resolved APARs on the IBM product support Web pages daily, so that
other users who experience the same problem can benefit from the same resolutions.