Are You Still Having to Look at Log Files?

by | Mar 14, 2019

I was talking to a customer last week about the workflows they use when a customer contacts the support organization for service.

The most common workflow I see is something like this: customer calls the help desk, the agent asks a bunch of questions, and if they can’t resolve the issue then the agent gets a specialist or an engineer involved. They may open a remote access session to connect to the device (IF it’s connected…) If the problem still can’t be resolved, then they dispatch a field service engineer to the customer. While onsite, the engineer either triages and resolves the issue on their own or they talk to their own help desk to help get things sorted out.

This particular customer said “we don’t necessarily do that. If the help desk can’t resolve the issue, then we ask the customer to send us a set of log files for us to analyze.” Then if they can identify an issue through the examination of these files, they dispatch the engineer.

Going through log files is time-consuming and complicated. You have to look at the files sent to you by the customer when there’s an issue and then you have to compare those files with other log files that represent a healthy machine.

Have you ever seen a log file? They look like this:

Log file

I asked this customer (a multi-billion-dollar company) how many engineers they had who were capable of doing this type of analysis and he said, “just a few”.

Incredible. The triaging of most customer issues is bottle necked by just a few people who can identify the cause.

RevTwo can consume log files and within just seconds can come back to the user with a root cause and a solution, along with documentation or artifacts (such as a PDF, Instructional video, etc.) that can assist the user in fixing the problem.

With this capability, we are seeing our customers empowering non-technical people to triage and resolve issues without having to get support involved. Examples would be having machine operators using a RevTwo application running on their machine to invoke our AI to get a solution. We’re working with another company who has their own salespeople oversee the operation of their machine in the field. In the past, when there was a problem, the operator would have to stop the machine while the salesperson talked to support. Today, they can use the RevTwo Navigator mobile app to triage and resolve the issue without having to call in a technical person.

All of this saves time, money, reduces the load on support, and improves up time for the customer.

And nobody has to look at log files.