Configuring AutoSupport for the appliance
Veritas recommends that you configure AutoSupport for improved customer support experience and reduced downtime in case of failures.
The AutoSupport service allows for proactive monitoring, management, and support of the cluster's health and performance. It identifies the probable risks and issues in the environment and provides alerts to admin users and service engineers. This mechanism lets you manage such issues before they have an adverse effect on your production environment.
You must enable Call Home to allow your appliance to connect with a Veritas AutoSupport server and upload hardware and software information. Call Home alerts you and Veritas in the event of critical conditions that may affect the operational capability of the system, such as hardware component failure. Call Home uploads hardware and software information to a secure Veritas AutoSupport server when an alert is detected. This information may be used by Veritas to proactively open a support case with Technical Support. A Technical Support Engineer contacts you to further diagnose the issue, such as gathering logs and to arrange for replacement field service of the reported component, if needed. The collected hardware information generally includes the information about the appliance hardware and software state, events, configuration, and performance data. The appliance uses the HTTPS protocol and uses port 443 to connect to the Veritas server.
Call Home monitors the following hardware components as they apply to your specific appliance model:
CPU
Fan
Disk
Power supplies
DIMM
Firmware
Environmental telemetry data
System temperature
System voltages
Fan speeds
BBU charge status
RAID controllers
RAID volume groups
System board components by the Integrated Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) chip
Storage subsystems (shelves and interconnects)
If Call Home is disabled and an alert condition occurs, the appliance only generates a local email or an SNMP trap to notify you of the alert.
SMTP configuration is required for alerting your internal teams to any hardware or software issues affecting the appliance. You must either configure your mail server to allow the appliance to use it as a mail relay or create an account for the appliance on your mail server and supply login credentials.