IBM Cloud Docs
Getting help

Getting help

Still having issues? Review different ways to get help and support for Satellite. For questions or feedback, post in Slack.

General ways to resolve issues

  • Make sure that your command-line tools are up to date.
    • In the terminal, you are notified when updates to the ibmcloud CLI and plug-ins are available. Be sure to keep your CLI up to date so that you can use all available commands and flags.
    • Make sure that your kubectl and oc CLI client matches the same Kubernetes version as your cluster server. Kubernetes does not support kubectl client versions that are 2 or more versions apart from the server version (n +/- 2).
  • Keep the clusters and hosts in your Satellite location up to date.
  • Enable and review logging and monitoring details to troubleshoot your Satellite components.

Reviewing cloud issues and status

  1. To see whether IBM Cloud is available, check the IBM Cloud status page.
  2. Filter for the Satellite component and review any cloud status issue.
  3. Review the requirements, limitations, and known issues documentation.
  4. For issues in open source projects that are used by IBM Cloud, see the IBM open source and third-party policy.

Identifying issues for Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service

If you experience an issue with a Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service in your location, first check whether your issue is listed in the troubleshooting topics in the Satellite documentation. If the issue is not listed in the Satellite documentation, check the IBM Cloud documentation set for the service.

For example, if you cannot access the Red Hat OpenShift console for a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on Satellite, first check whether the issue is specific to your Satellite location setup. If your Satellite location setup is not the source of the issue, then check the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud documentation for troubleshooting console issues.

Reviewing logs

You can review logs to troubleshoot issues.

If your host is not assigned to a cluster, or if the assignment fails, you can SSH into the host machine and view logs. Otherwise, Satellite disables the ability to log in to the host by using SSH for security purposes. For more information about viewing logs on your host machine, see Logging in to a host machine to debug.

If you are using Schematics, you can view job log details to find information about your deployment. For more information, see Reviewing the Schematics job details.

You can also view logs that are automatically generated for your Satellite location setup and collected in an IBM Log Analysis instance. For more information, see Logging for Satellite.

Feedback and questions

Review forums such as Stack Overflow to see whether other users ran into the same issue. When you use the forums to ask a question, tag your question so that it is seen by the IBM Cloud development teams.

For questions about Satellite, use the tags ibm-cloud and satellite.

If you have technical questions about developing or deploying clusters or apps with Red Hat OpenShift, post your question on Stack Overflow and tag your question with ibm-cloud, openshift, and containers.

See Getting help for more details about using the forums.

Contacting support

  1. Before you open a support case, gather relevant information about your Satellite environment.

    1. Get the details of the resource that you want help with troubleshooting, such as your Satellite location or a host.
      ibmcloud sat location get --location <location_name_or_ID>
      
      ibmcloud sat host get --location <location_name_or_ID> --host <host_ID>
      
    2. For any hosts, include relevant details about the underlying infrastructure provider, such as if the host is in an Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or other environment.
    3. For issues with resources within your cluster such as pods or services, log in to the cluster and use the Kubernetes API to get more information about them. If the resources are managed by Satellite configuration, get the details of your configuration and subscription.

    You can also use the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Diagnostics and Debug Tool to gather and export pertinent information to share with IBM Support.

  2. Contact IBM Support by opening a case. To learn about opening an IBM support case, or about support levels and case severities, see Contacting support.

  3. For the Problem type, search for or select Satellite.

  4. For the Case details, provide a descriptive title and include the details that you previously gathered. From the Resources, you can also select the cluster that the issue is related to, if any.

Opting in to receive email notifications

You can opt in to receive email notifications about IBM Cloud platform-related items across your account and resource-related items for incidents, maintenance, security bulletins, and resource activity updates. Email notifications are not turned on by default. To understand how to set up these email notifications, see Setting email preferences for notifications.