Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft GDB - WG5 - First Ideas WG5 – User support – First ideas Mandate: Recommend the initial LCG-1 user support model, including: -Define the scope of responsibilities for a call center and/or helpdesk type facility serving LCG -Define the call center – one place or many ? – and define the process for communication to ensure problem resolution tracking, -Define acceptable user expectations (or SLA, service level agreements), including the framework within which to implement these, -Define how such a facility interacts with local support services at sites providing grid resources, -Recommend procedures and tools to track and coordinate distributed/grid problem resolution Members of WG5 up to now: Ian Bird, Klaus-Peter Mickel, Laura Perini

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft GDB - WG5 - First Ideas WG5 – Some questions Should we concentrate on a help desk facility only or should we enlarge the issues on: -General user information (about grid, middleware, system and appl. software...) -Making available all kinds of documentation (about grid, middleware,...) -Education and training for help desk personnel -Education and training for users -Providing tools for testing the grid functionality -Providing tools for finding out grid users satisfaction  Concerning these topics there are some remarkable activities at the GGF  And there is the well known ITIL activity in UK (ITIL = IT Infrastructure Library), which has collected since the eighties lots of ideas and suggestions e.g. for incident management, problem management, service level management, availability management and so on. We do'nt have to invent all anew.

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft GDB - WG5 - First Ideas Some topics for the help desk facility -One call center or many – Maybe three? US, Europe, Asia? -What tools for register and tracking the problems? Which access method? One single data base or several distributed data bases? -Service level agreements – How to define a service level and how to check it? -Different SLAs for local and global users? -Interaction of the n global call centers – with each other and with local services -Building a knowledge data base for all resolved problems? If so, who is allowed to access this data base – only call center people or (all) users? -Distinguishing local problems and global problems -Which call center resolves a reported problem? The one, which has accepted the problem or another call center (e. g. in the daylight zone)? -For what problems is a call center responsible – and for what not at all?

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft GDB - WG5 - First Ideas Some suggestions for the next 4 weeks -The GridKa people in Karlsruhe will propose a first draft of a WG5 paper within 2 weeks -Afterwards we should discuss this draft within the WG5 (who is joining the WG5?) -We will deliver a first report at the next GDB meeting (10th of march, Taipei)