Sometimes you run into a situation where you need help to continue. Atlassian provides a couple of channels to which you can resort in this case.
In many cases the online documentation (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/) has detailed information to get you sorted out. If you cannot find what you need in the documentation, you could ask your question online via Atlassian Answers. Of course it is always possible to create a support ticket with Atlassian or turn to an Atlassian Expert to help you.
Atlassian Answers is the community-driven Q&A site that is available for everybody. In case you need help, you can log in to https://answers.atlassian.com with your Atlassian ID (the same account you use for maintaining your licenses).
Answers is a reputation system that uses Karma to incentivize users to participate and give correct answers to the questions that are posted. With enough Karma points, you will receive a T-shirt from Atlassian.
If you can't find an answer to your question on Answers, or you need to share some information about your installation you are not comfortable with, there is always Atlassian Support to help.
With a valid license you are entitled to support from Atlassian. To get the most out of the Atlassian Support, it helps to do a preliminary diagnosis on your system using the built-in support tools.
Confluence provides a built-in log scanner. The scanner will check your Confluence logs for errors and will compare them against a list of know issues in Atlassian's knowledge base and bug tracker. The log scanner is called Hercules . Hercules will connect to the Internet to retrieve the last set of known issues; your files will not be sent over the Internet. System administrators can use Hercules to scan logfiles.
To use the log scanner:
- Browse to the Administration Console (Administration | Confluence Admin).
- Choose Atlassian Support Tools in the left-hand side menu.
- Select the Log Scanner below the Troubleshooting header.
- If your logfile is in the default location, click on Scan. Otherwise, change the location first.
- The log scanner will return a list of links pointing to Atlassian's knowledge base or bug tracker.
- The last reported problems are displayed first. If you have more than 10 errors matching known issues, click on the Show All link that appears on top of the page.
- Choose a link to check the reported problem and possible solution or workaround.
At this point we may have an issue without a known solution, and we have fixed most of the issues resulting from our log scanner diagnosis. This would be a good time to raise a support ticket at Atlassian.
The easiest way to raise a support ticket is directly from the Administration Console. If you are not able to use this method, you have to use the JIRA instance at https://support.atlassian.com.
The advantage of using this method is that all files needed to provide good support are directly added to the support request. Having an SMTP server set up is required for this method.
- Browse to the Administration Console (Administration | Confluence Admin).
- Choose Atlassian Support Tools in the left-hand menu.
- Select Support Request.
- Provide as much information a possible:
- Contact email: This defaults to the logged-in user. The e-mail address is used to find or create an account on https://support.atlassian.com. All further notification will be send to this e-mail.
- Summary: A brief description of the problem.
- Description: As much information as you can share, including any error message and steps to reproduce the problem.
- In the Support Data to Attach section, select the types of additional files you want to attach to the request. The more the better in this case, but keep in mind your company's privacy and non-disclosure rules.
- Choose Send to post your request.
Once the support request is received you will receive a notification via e-mail.
Atlassian has over 250 partners, called experts, who are dedicated to helping you with specific needs around Confluence and all other products. If you need training, custom add-ons or in-house support setting up your suite, a local expert is there to help you.
Getting an expert in early, to help you setting up Confluence, will pay off in the long term. Experts have seen many different installations, use cases and are well aware of the more than 1000 add-ons available to you.
To find a local expert, perform the following steps:
- Browse to http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/.
- Use the filter to specify:
- What kind of expert you are looking for (training, tuning, migration)
- For what kind of product (Confluence, JIRA)
- In which country
- Click on Search Experts to generate a list with experts matching your filter.
