Overview

Before you open a support ticket, please take a few minutes to read the following.  Our support engineers want to assist you in resolving any problems as soon as possible.  To do that, they may need to ask a number of questions to fully understand or replicate the issue.

How to Submit an Issue

We use a dedicated issue management system.  Whether you sign in to our support portal or send an email to our support email address, the result is the same.  A new issue will be created in our database and a notification is sent to our software engineers.  You will automatically receive an email notifying you of the unique reference number.

If you chose to respond to our queries via email, please ensure you do not change the subject line.  Please also remove any previous conversation from the message leaving only the NEW content.

This means that the issue progress can be tracked in our database  We would also recommend that you log in to the support portal to review and reply to requests.  The support portal can be found here:

Any updates to your report will result in an automatic email notification.  You can always log in at any time to check the status of your report.

Submitting a Report

The aim of an issue report is to enable a software engineer to identify a specific problem and to establish what needs to be done to rectify the issue.  To enable them to do this, you must provide careful and detailed instructions on how to make the software fail.  If they cannot replicate your issue, they will try to gather extra information until they know the cause.  If they can't make it fail, they will have to ask you to gather that information for them.  Please remember, your hardware/software setup may be completely different from our test environments and the way you use our software may also be completely different.  Other software products which have been incorrectly installed by the installation/setup programme can also have a detrimental affect on our software.

We use a number of shared Microsoft libraries, which if incorrectly installed or changed by another product, can cause issues.  These errors are extremely difficult to track down, so please be patient.  We will try everything we can to get our software working within your environment.

The basics: what you did, what you wanted to happen, and what actually happened

Those are the three basic elements of a bug report.  You will need to tell us exactly what you did, what you expected to have happen, and what actually happened.  Please provide as much information as you can.  The most important element will be if you can provide step by step instructions to recreate the issue.  This will allow us to recreate the bug and will be in a much better position to rectify the problem and fix it in a future release.  Use screen shots if you can; these will help the engineer to understand what you are trying to explain.  Data and screenshots can be uploaded and attached to the issue in the web support portal.  Getting access to the data causing the issue is also extremely important.  This is sometimes the only way to recreate a problem. 

Single line submissions such as “It won’t work” do not provide us with any useful information and will not allow an engineer to diagnose the problem.  This will not help you in trying to get the software to work and the problem resolved as quickly as possible.

Always Check the Release History before Reporting a Bug

Before you report a bug, please check that you are using the latest release available.  Also, check the release history to see if your issue or bug has already been reported.  Many reported issues have already been identified and solved in a subsequent release. 

Only report one problem in each bug report

If you have encountered two bugs that don't appear to be related, create a new bug report for each one.  This makes it easier for different people to help with the different bugs.

Mandatory Information

There are a number of things that we will need from you to effectively deal with your issue.  They are as follows:

  • Your Licence ID / Dongle ID (Help » About)
  • Exact Version and Build of the Software you have an issue with (Help » About)
  • Operating System Version and Service Pack along with whether 32/64 bit

Software Logging

Our software will write out a number of log files during the extraction and analysis processes.  Please include as many of these logs as you can as they can assist with the debugging process.

Error Logging in NetAnalysis

When an error message appears in NetAnalysis, the software logs information regarding this error to a log file.  This log will help our support engineers establish the cause of the issue.  The folder containing the logs can be accessed by selecting Help » Error Reporting.  Please ensure that all error logs are submitted with your support request.


HstEx and Blade Recovery Logs

Another source of information to help support engineers identify the cause of an issue is the recovery log created by HstEx and Blade during a recovery session.  This file can be found in the export folder for the corresponding recovery session.



External Links

Please see the following external web page which describes the process of reporting software bugs and provides some useful hints and tips:

The Result

Please remember to update us if the issue has been resolved.  We work hard to resolve the issues reported to us and will do our best to get you back on track as soon as possible.