Chapter 15: Troubleshooting and Support

This final chapter will cover the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub support model. We will walk through the integrated support experience and show a typical diagnostic flow for a support case. We will cover obtaining Microsoft Azure Stack Hub logs and engage with privileged endpoints. The final part of this book will then offer some tips on troubleshooting some common issues.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the Azure Stack Hub support model
• Reviewing the integrated support experience
• Looking at Azure Stack Hub logs
• Understanding Azure Stack Hub troubleshooting

We will start this chapter by understanding the Azure Stack Hub support model.

Technical requirements

You can view this chapter's code in action here: https://bit.ly/3Df88ob

Understanding the Azure Stack Hub support model

Azure Stack Hub support is split into two parts – hardware support and software support:

• Hardware support is engaged directly with the hardware provider.
• Software support is engaged directly with Microsoft. If you already purchase software support from Microsoft (Azure, Premier, or Partner support), these contracts also cover Azure Stack Hub software support, and no additional contracts or fees are needed.

Although support is provided by the hardware vendor and Microsoft, the integrated support experience ensures a coordinated escalation and resolution so that you get a consistent support experience, no matter who you call first. We will cover this integrated support experience in the next section.

To understand the Azure Stack Hub support model, we need to look at where customers will buy their support and the contact breakdown as this will vary, depending on who owns and operates the Azure Stack Hub environment...

Reviewing the integrated support experience

The hybrid support experience offered in Azure Stack Hub covers the full system life cycle and is consistent and fully integrated.

You need two support instruments to ensure that Azure Stack Hub is fully supported. The first is with Microsoft, who will cover the necessary support for the cloud services. The second is with the hardware vendor, who will offer system support. The integrated support experience is designed to offer a consistent support experience, no matter who you call first when it comes to coordinated escalation and system support.

As an example, when purchasing Azure Stack Hub from Lenovo, it comes with a support solution called ThinkAgile Advantage. This provides a single point of contact for all support issues related to Azure Stack Hub. The support engineers who are contacted through this process are level 3 engineers with a deep understanding of the Azure Stack Hub platform. This integrated support experience also...

Looking at Azure Stack Hub logs

As we mentioned in the previous section, there may be times when you're working through support issues with Microsoft or the hardware vendor, and they ask you to share diagnostic logs that have been created by Azure Stack Hub. These logs will have been generated by the Windows components within Azure Stack Hub and also the on-premises Azure services. The support personnel should be able to use the information from these logs to help resolve any issues with the Azure Stack Hub environment.

There are several ways that you can send this diagnostic information to Microsoft support, depending on the connectivity Azure has to Azure Stack Hub. Some of these options are as follows:

• Send logs proactively
• Send logs now
• Save logs locally

The flowchart shown in the following figure details which option is best for sending these diagnostics logs to Microsoft support based on the connectivity available. If Azure Stack Hub can connect...

Understanding Azure Stack Hub troubleshooting

Before raising a case with Microsoft support for issues with Azure Stack Hub, there are some commands that you can perform yourself to try to resolve some common issues. One of the first tools to utilize is the Test-AzureStack PowerShell cmdlet, which validates the Azure Stack Hub deployment and can help isolate common failures. You should always run Test-AzureStack before performing any system updates or applying hotfixes.

The Test-AzureStack cmdlet can be used to run infrastructure tests or cloud scenario tests against the Azure Stack Hub environment. To be able to perform the cloud scenario tests, you must use cloud administrator credentials. The cloud scenario tests are as follows:

• Creating resource groups
• Creating plans
• Creating offers
• Creating storage accounts
• Creating virtual machines
• Performing blob operations using the storage account that was created
• Performing queue operations using the storage...

Summary

In this final chapter, we started by understanding the Azure Stack Hub support model. We learned that support is split between the hardware vendor who supplied the Azure Stack Hub platform and Microsoft. We now have an understanding of what support contracts are required based on how the Azure Stack Hub platform has been licensed and who provides that support. Then, we looked at the integrated support experience, which demonstrated that the support an Azure Stack Hub operator receives should be consistent, regardless of whether they call Microsoft or the hardware vendor for support. We looked at how incidents could be raised with Microsoft and how a typical support case would be handled. This then led us nicely into the next section, where we looked at the various ways of collecting diagnostic information from logs and sharing them with Microsoft to aid in troubleshooting. We should now be familiar with the different ways of sharing these logs, both through the portal and with...

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