Every once in a while I have a customer ask me a simple question, or bring me a simple problem, and I don’t know the answer for it. So I make sure that I understand the question, and then I go off and find out the answer for them. Sometimes these answers are simple, and sometimes these answers SHOULD be simple, but they are not well known. Today I ran into one of those situations, and thought it would be good to share it.
The Problem – Users Cannot Open Support Tickets on IBM Cloud
My customer is relatively new to the IBM Cloud, let’s call them the Acme Corporation. They have a subscription with a corporate account (ibmcloudadmin@acme.com). One of their users (Sally@acme.com) goes into the account and is doing some work with an instance of Watson Assistant. She runs into some odd behaviour and wants to open up a support ticket. If you look in the upper right of the browser UI, you will see that she is in the proper context (ibmcloudadmin@acme.com). When she tries to open a ticket, it tells her that she has Basic Support, and when she attempts to submit the ticket she gets an error dialog that says, “You do not have ticket add and view permissions”. So what do we do to fix this?
The problem is that our user (Sally@acme.com) does not have permissions to open tickets for the account in question (ibmcloudadmin@acme.com).
Solution #1 – Add Sally to the Account With Infrastructure Access
The first solution to this is to add Sally’s account (Sally@acme.com) to the list of users with access to the ibmcloudadmin@acme.com infrastructure resources. This needs to be done by the account administrator, who will need to be logged in as an account administrator/owner.
You can now do this by inviting Sally as a new user, using the Invite New User page (part of the normal user management on the IBM Cloud). When you do this, you will want to be sure to give Sally a “Basic User” role for her Infrastructure access (see the picture below).
This will allow Sally’s account to create support tickets while working in the context of the corporate IBM Cloud account.
Solution #2 – Change Sally’s Infrastructure Access
The other thing that can be done is to modify the Infrastructure permissions assigned for Sally’s account (Sally@acme.com). This also needs to be done by the account administrator, who will need to be logged in as an account administrator/owner.
You can do this by following the steps outlined here. First, start by looking at the list of tickets for the account.
You can do this by following the steps outlined here. First, start by looking at the list of tickets for the account. From the Menu bar, select Support -> View Tickets.
Then you will want to get a list of the users who have access to the infrastructure available in the IBM Cloud, so select Account -> Users -> User List.
Now in that list of IBM Cloud infrastructure users, you will want to find the users that you want to give the ability to submit support tickets, and you will select Edit Portal Access. This will take you to the IBM Cloud Infrastructure portal access dialog for that particular user.
Once the portal access dialog comes up in the browser, make sure that you have selected the correct user, and then give that user permission to add, edit, view, and search thru support tickets. Your screen should look similar to what you see below.
Conclusion: You need to give your users the ability to submit support tickets
The IBM Cloud has a finer-grained access, role, and permission model with the move towards resource groups and IAM. Part of this finer-grained access is the ability to allow your users to submit, view, search, and edit support tickets. Make sure that you get your users set up correctly the first time – so you can avoid these issues in the future.
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