Managing Your Support Tickets on the Flux Portal
In recent posts, I’ve talked about some of the changes we’ve made (and are continuing to make) to the Flux Portal, to provide a strong, integrated experience for our users. Today I’ll be taking a look at another one of those changes: the ability to view and manage support tickets, bug reports and feature requests directly from your browser.
To get started, first head to portal.fluxcorp.com/jira. As the URL indicates, we at Flux use Atlassian JIRA for support ticket tracking, as well as bug reports and new feature requests. You can also access JIRA after logging in to the main Portal dashboard (portal.fluxcorp.com) and selecting the “Support Dashboard” option on that page.
When you first visit the support dashboard, you’ll be prompted for a username and password. Just enter your Flux Portal credentials here to log in.
Logging In
If you don’t have a Flux Portal account, you can still access the Support Dashboard! The first time you send a mail to support@fluxcorp.com (which will open a support ticket), or someone else CC’s you on a ticket, you’ll receive a message back from the system with a new username and password you can use to access the Portal.
After you’ve logged in, you’ll find a box on the right-hand side of the page labelled “Saved Filters”. These filters allow you to browse the different items available, sorted by category.
Saved Filters
The items you can expect to find in each category are as follows:
- Bugs: Outstanding problems in the Flux software that have been reported to the development team and are awaiting a fix.
- New Features: Upcoming features and improvements to the Flux software that have been scheduled for implementation, either in a specific release or in the long-term Flux Road Map.
- Your Closed Support Tickets: Tickets that your or a Flux support engineer have marked as resolved. If you are looking for a reminder of the resolution of a previous item or a tidbit of information you’d previously received from the support team, you can find it here.
- Your Open Support Tickets: Ongoing support tickets. You can use this filter to view your active tickets and comment on them, mark them as resolved, or provide additional information.
To manage your active tickets, select the “Your Open Support Tickets” option from this list.
Once the filter is selected, you’ll see a view of all of your open tickets, along with a status and some additional information about the ticket. You can quickly see when the last update on the ticket was issued, whether the ticket is waiting for you or for a Flux support engineer, and more. To open a particular ticket, just click its entry in the “Key” column of this table:
Select the Key of the Ticket you want to View
A new view will appear showing the entire history of the ticket (including your replies and replies from the Flux support team) and a list of operations you can perform on the ticket.
Viewing a Ticket
You’ll notice a few options for the ticket in the column on the left-hand side of the page:
- Flip to Flux or Flip to Customer: If a ticket is waiting for your reply but you need some additional information from Flux, you can click “Flip to Flux” (or, if a ticket is waiting for Flux but you want to gather additional information before continuing, click “Flip to Customer”). If a ticket is waiting for your reply and you add a comment, the “Flip to Flux” option will be automatically invoked as well.
- Resolve Ticket: If you feel that no further action is needed on this ticket, you can resolve it using this option. Once you have resolved a support ticket, the Flux support team will review the ticket to determine whether any Flux improvements or documentation updates are appropriate, then close the ticket for you.
- Bump Ticket: This option is primarily used internally within JIRA (although you can select it, it will not have noticeable effect on the ticket except to increase its “Updated” date).
- Attach file: Allows you to attach a file to the ticket – this is useful for sharing logs, configuration files and other items with the support team. Any items you attach on an email to support@fluxcorp.com will also automatically be attached to the ticket.
- Attach screenshot: Allows you to attach a screenshot to the ticket (similar to “Attach file” above).
- Clone: Create a new support ticket, but copy all of the setting and the initial “Description” for this ticket.
- Comment: Add a new comment on the ticket. Commenting on a ticket is equivalent to sending an email for the ticket, and the Flux support team will automatically receive a copy of each comment you add through this interface.
- sub-task: If you need to open a new ticket but it is related to a subset of this ticket, you can add the ticket as a sub-task (this will allow the tickets to be linked through the JIRA interface).
- Email: Send a copy of this ticket as an email to an external address.
It’s that simple to view and manage your tickets! As you can see, the Support Dashboard is a great way to keep track of your past and present communications with the Flux support team.
You can use the same interface to view and comment on bugs and feature requests as well. In my next post, we’ll explore how you can use JIRA to communicate with the Flux development team about which bug fixes and improvements are most important to you.
