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Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) is your main source of technical support when you need assistance with issues that you cannot resolve on your own.
The goal of all TAC engineers is to fix any problem that you are experiencing with as much speed and quality as is possible. There are many things you can do to make this process successful. This section gives you insight about how we operate so that you can get the most out of our support and achieve the best and fastest results possible.
TAC (Technical Assistance Center) is an organization of Cisco Support that was built to isolate individual problems and fix them. In the case of more than one solution being viable, all options are presented so that you, the customer, can choose which solution best suits your environment.
Each SR (Service Request) handles a single problem and works to solve that specific problem. In the case of more than one problem being present, more than one SR can be opened. If the problem is directly related to another issue currently being worked by an engineer, they will clone your case and keep troubleshooting for each problem separate. If another problem is unrelated, it is the customer's responsibility to open another case and the next possible engineer will assist you.
TAC does not provide training, perform installs/upgrades/patches, or provide support for non-Cisco products. We also do not design solutions around requirements (job/calendar/action/event creation, for instance). If there is a question about functionality, a problem during an install/upgrade/patch, or it is decided that a 3rd party product is acting correctly but in the context of the TES integration working incorrectly, then TAC is more than happy to provide support.
Cisco Advanced Services (AS) is a support organization that can be paid outside of your current TAC contract for installs/upgrade/patches or nearly any other need that TAC is not designed to assist with. A regular SR should be opened with these requirements and TAC will redirect you to AS to assist further.
Regular TES support hours are 8am-8pm Easter Standard Time, Monday-Friday. P1s and P2s created outside of these hours will be handled by an on-call engineer. P3s and P4s will be accepted and worked at the beginning of the next regular support shift. See How TAC Determines Case Severity for an definition of the P1-P4 severity levels.
Online —You can open a P3 or P4 case online:
https://tools.cisco.com/ServiceRequestTool/scm/mgmt/case
Email —You can open a P3 or P4 case through email:
Phone —You can open a P1, P2, P3, or P4 case over the phone:
See How to Interact with TAC for information about P1-to-P4 case severity and details about filing a case.
See these sections for details about filing cases and working with TAC as efficiently as possible:
There are four case severity levels—P1 to P4—each of which is determined by the criteria described below. The purpose of these severity level delineations is to support the structure we've put in place to serve you given the resources that we have. P1 and P2 cases can pull engineers out of meetings with others, so it is important that the categorization below are used when choosing the severity level of the case.
P1 —Production system is down and cannot be recovered. Urgent support is needed. You need to open these kinds of cases through the phone and an engineer will join within 5 minutes. The engineer will be on the phone until the customer decides that the system is in a state that can be lowered from this severity. If there is not an active phone call between customer and engineer at any point, the case is lowered to P3.
P2 —Production system severely degraded. Essential components are down. On our end, this is handled the same way as a P1.
P3 —Any other issue that does not qualify as a P1 or P2. An engineer will contact you as soon as possible on your preferred contact method chosen when opening the case.
P4 —This SR is purely informational or procedural and has very little severity in comparison to P1-P3.
To ensure the best results when you file a case, follow these guidelines:
https://tools.cisco.com/ServiceRequestTool/scm/mgmt/case
If your business's and our severity model do not line up and you need help promptly, feel free to call your support engineer via the number in his/her signature. Leave a message on their voice mail if they are unable to answer the phone at this time. They will get in contact with you at their next availability.
If you are not able to reach your engineer and need immediate assistance, call in to the phone support line (see How to Contact TAC and Open a Case), provide your SR number for the case, then the Customer Interactive Network (CIN) call center agent will reach out to the engineer via internal tools. At this point, you can either requeue the case to the next available engineer, and/or raise the severity of the case if the issue has evolved into an issue we define as a P1 or P2 severity. Requeuing any case provides the next engineer with the case notes of the issue, but their experience on the issue has reset, compared to your current engineer who might have more insight on the issue. It is in your best interest to make this decision with this in mind.
Note If the TAC engineer cannot get in contact with you three times within two business weeks, the SR will be closed due to lack of response. To avoid this, please stay in touch, even if no progress is possible.
To check the status of an existing issue:
Step 1 In your brownser, go to this Cisco URL:
The Cisco Support Community for TES is another tool for getting information about a variety of topics that customers are discussing:
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/5711/tidal-enterprise-scheduler#quicktabs-community_activity=3