Stop 7 of 9 · Weekly
Network and vendor tickets
Gather the facts a Meraki or ISP ticket needs, write the one that gets a real engineer instead of a script, and translate the reply back into plain English.
The two hard parts of a vendor ticket
Network problems are rarely hard to see. The Meraki dashboard shows the uplink flapping, the users tell you which floor. The hard parts are on either side of the diagnosis: assembling the evidence into a ticket that reaches someone who can act, and turning the reply back into something Tariq and the office can both use.
First-line vendor support exists to filter. It asks whether you have rebooted, whether it is one device or all of them, and what the circuit ID is, and each round trip costs a day. Every one of those questions you answer before they ask it is a day saved.
What a good vendor ticket carries
| Always in the ticket | Never in the ticket |
|---|---|
| Circuit or serial ID, site address, contact | Dashboard API keys or portal credentials |
| Timestamps with the time zone, and how often | User names or client financial detail |
| What you already tested and what it ruled out | A guess at their internal cause |
| The symptom on both sides, not just yours | Anything you have not verified yourself |
Prompts
Write a support ticket to our ISP for the Kelso Road site of Grantham and Reed. Below are the Meraki uplink event log for the last 24 hours, the loss and latency graph readings, and my own notes. Lead with the circuit ID and the site. Then the symptom in two sentences, then a timeline with timestamps in local time and the time zone stated, then a numbered list of what I have already tested and what each test ruled out. End with the one specific thing I want them to do. Under 300 words, no adjectives, no urgency language. Remove any user name that appears in my notes. [paste the logs and your notes]
Here is the ISP's reply. Give me three things. First, what they are actually saying, in plain English, in under 80 words. Second, what they are asking me to provide or do, and exactly where in the Meraki dashboard or on the MX I would get it. Third, a three-line update I can post in the Kelso Road Teams channel that says what is happening and when I will next update them, with no acronyms. [paste the vendor reply]
Here are the uplink statistics for both sites over 48 hours and a note of every change I made this week. Tell me which side of the demarcation point the evidence points to, which readings support that, and the one test that would settle it. If the evidence does not decide it, say so and tell me what to capture next.