When a ticket is not moving
Sometimes a ticket stalls. Here is how to move it, and what makes the difference between a ticket that gets picked up and one that gets queued.
First, the thing that speeds up every ticket
Four lines, at the top:
- Which machine — our identifier if you have it, from the label on the chassis or the portal. See naming and labelling.
- What is broken, concretely. “HTTP times out from outside” rather than “the server is down”.
- Since when, with a timezone.
- What you already checked, so nobody repeats it.
That turns a ticket an engineer has to interview you about into one they can start on. See opening a ticket.
Mark urgency honestly
Urgency is a shared resource. If everything is urgent, nothing is — and the real emergency queues behind the routine question.
- Genuinely urgent
- Production is down. Hardware has failed. You are under attack. Something is leaving your machine that should not be.
- Normal
- Degraded but working. A question. A planned change.
- Low
- Information, quotes, anything with no deadline.
Used accurately, this works well. Used as a volume control, it stops working for you specifically.
How to escalate
Reply on the existing ticket rather than opening a new one — a second ticket splits the history and slows things down. In the reply, say plainly that you are escalating and why: what has changed, what it is now costing, and what you need next.
Then mail support@novogara.com with the ticket number in the subject if it is genuinely time-critical. An engineer answers at any hour.
What we do on our side
For anything serious you get a named engineer rather than a queue, updates while it is open rather than only at the end, and a straight account of what happened afterwards. If it was ours, we say so.
Where the SLA applies it applies without you having to argue for it — see claiming service credits.
Where the line is
The machines are unmanaged. If the problem is in your operating system or your application, we will tell you what we would look at next and we will check anything measurable from our side — but the fix is yours. That is not a brush-off; it is what unmanaged means, and it is why the machines cost what they do.
If the measurements point below your operating system — interface errors, disk latency with no process responsible, memory errors, steal time on a dedicated machine — that is ours, and it is replaced from stock in Amsterdam. See hardware failure and diagnosing a slow server.
If you are unhappy with how it went
Say so, on the ticket. We would rather hear it than lose a customer quietly. The business we want is the kind that lasts years, and that only works if the awkward conversations happen.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base