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What to share when reporting issues to Delft-FEWS support

Provide clear problem descriptions

1. A detailed description of what the problem is.
2. What the expected behavior is.
3. Describe in numbered steps how to reproduce the issue.
4. If there are multiple problems, number them, e.g. Issue 1, Issue 2, etc. so that they be more easily registered under separate issues in the issue tracker.
5. If there is a GUI component involved
   1. specify in ordered steps what component to activate, where to click.
   2. share a screenshot of the problem,
   3. or share a movie using the screen recording functionality.

Provide additional context

1. Is it a new problem? If there is a known JIRA issue number please include it in the communication.

2. What has changed? Has there been a recent configuration change?

3. Which workflows are involved.
4. What T0 (system time) is used for a failing forecast run.
5. If an adapter is run with an older JRE version, this is useful to mention.
6. What menu item will bring up the component of interest.

Share the config, local datastore

It depends on the bug whether the configuration or other things are needed. 

1. If an import fails, share an example import file and configuration as a zip.
2. If a specific module fails, share the config.
3. Config and local datastore are not strictly necessary for all bugfixes, but including

1. them will speed up support.

How to help us to support you

(Especially when you have no idea what is wrong and where to look)

Below you will find some useful tips to analyse your system and provide useful information to the fews support helpdesk.

In general:

• Check the System Monitor Display in your Operator Client and Analyse the ERROR messages (what kind of errors do you see), export (copy) them and send them to fews support
• Make screenshots of the problem that you encounter (graphs / spatial display / admin interface / etc)
• Check the Troubleshooting section or the section about Log files and the System Checks (depends on age of document) section in the System Administrations Guide provided for your FEWS system

If it is a connection problem (with the Master Controller):

• Check the status of the system through Admin Interface system status page, is everything green?
• Check the View logs page in the Admin Interface for ERRORs
• Log files in the Master-controller / Forecasting Shells will by default only remain the last ten days / for a certain disk limit.
• Use Collect System log files from the Admin Interface to collect the log files from all FEWS backend components and send them to fews support

If it is a problem with (failing) workflows on the Forecasting Shells

• Check the log.txt in the root of your Forecasting Shell or out.txt or out.txt.old in the MCProxy folder (check your system admin guide for the location)
• Check the View logs page in the Admin Interface for ERRORs
• Use Collect System log files from the Admin Interface to collect the log files from all FEWS backend components and send them to fews support

If it is a problem in your Operator Client:

• Check the log.txt file from your Operator Client to find out whether it contains the Text ERROR. This file is located at the same level where the localDatastore folder is created. Please send this log.txt to fews support
• If you send us a snippet of the log.txt, please remember to include always the build number section.
• If it is an issue with your operator client please copy the localDatastore folder (and store it somewhere else) for hand over to fews support if needed

Note Delft-FEWS will run through a VPN or via Remote Desktop Protocol, so having those connections available to us will improve the efficiency of our support. The ability to diagnose issues will depend upon the bandwidth for the connection.