Puppet Customer Handbook

Welcome to Puppet by Perforce. This is your guide to getting help from Puppet Support. We have two levels of support: Premium and Standard. All Support customers can get help from our team in their own time zone from Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Support is available 24 x 7 for Premium blocker severity cases.

Note: Nothing in this document supersedes your current Support contract.

When you buy a Puppet product, Support credentials are generated and sent to you by email. If you can’t find the email, please check your spam folder and email filters. If you didn’t get an email with credentials, or you no longer have the email, please fill out and submit the form on the Support Portal Login Request page to let us know you need help.  You’ll get an email from the Perforce Support Community (a perforce.com email) with a link to help you get logged in.

If you need to reset your password, you can change it on the Password Reset page.

If you want some or all of your colleagues to have access to all your organization’s cases in the Support Portal, make a request on the Support Portal Login Request page. Include the name and email address of each colleague who needs access. When you need to adjust access to cases, let us know on the Login Request page, and we will take care of it.

If you don’t have Support credentials, please fill out and submit the form on the Support Portal Login Request page to let us know you need help. If you need to reset your password, you can change it on the Password Reset page.

If you have credentials but are having issues signing in or using the portal, learn how to resolve it.

We offer support by telephone and via the Support Portal.

Telephone 

Support is available via telephone 24 x 7 for Premium Support blocker severity cases. We have a toll-free US-based phone number and local non-US phone numbers. Regardless of your region, the time, or the phone number you call, you’ll reach the same support queue, answered by our Global Support Team. If you don’t have the number, ask for it in a new case.

Support Portal 

At the Support Portal, you can search our Knowledge Base to check for help with your issues. Our articles might either solve your issue, or help you gather more information so that Support can close your case more quickly.  

All Support customers can get help from our team in their own time zone from Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. by opening a case at the Support Portal. Premium Support customers can open a case 24 x 7 for blocker severity cases. 

When you open a case, fill out as much information as you can so that our team can help you find a solution.  

Let us know: 

  • The business impact of the issue
  • When the issue started
  • If you made changes recently, including upgrades
  • If there was a major incident that occurred prior to the issue
  • The last few commands entered, or buttons clicked, before the issue occurred
  • Troubleshooting steps that you have taken
  • Error messages
  • Integrations and modules you are using 

When you submit a case, you will get an email letting you know that your request has reached us. The team will reply when they have reviewed your case. You will hear back within your service level agreement response time.

Our team provides global support. Support engineers are available in your time zone from Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for all requests and 24 x 7 for Premium blocker severity case.

Support is available 24 x 7 for Premium blocker severity case.

In the event of a blocking escalation (e.g., an outage) please open a new case in the Support Portal and set the priority to Blocker. This will alert our on-call staff and alert our global team. You should receive a response within 60 minutes of raising the new case.

If a case is not a blocker but is not progressing as you’d like and you’d like to escalate it, please reply within your original case that you’d like to escalate it. The support engineer will make the relevant changes to the priority and escalate the case within our teams.

When you log in to the portal, you can view your cases and your organization’s cases on the Customer Portal Case Dashboard page by clicking on My Cases in the upper right corner of the page, and then clicking List Views. Under List views you can select My Company’s Cases or My Cases.

If you can’t view your organization’s cases and would like to, fill out the form on the Support Portal Login Request page with the changes you’d like to see.

When you log in to the portal, you can view your organization’s cases on the Customer Portal Case Dashboard page by clicking on My Cases in the upper right corner of the page, and then clicking List Views. Under List views you can select My Company’s Cases or My Cases.

If you can’t view your organization’s cases and would like to, fill out the form on the Support Portal Login Request page with the changes you’d like to see.

Support business hours are Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in your time zone.

We provide two levels of support: Premium and Standard. Premium support has 24 x 7 service level agreement (SLA) response times for blocker severity cases. All other requests are worked from Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in your time zone.    In observance of local holidays, critical, major, and minor severity responses for all Support customers may occur the next business day. We have Support available for blocker severity requests per your support entitlement. 

  • Blocker severity: Critical production Puppet functionality is inoperative or severely degraded. No workaround is available. Blocker severity support is not available for end-of-life versions of software. Response time is 1 hour for Premium support customers and 1 business hour for Standard support customers.
  • If you have a blocker severity issue and Premium support, please call us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have staff available to work blocker severity issues around the clock, please have your team’s contact information ready for us.
  • If you have a blocker severity case and Standard support, please add Blocker to the Subject field.
  • Critical severity: Puppet functionality or performance is significantly degraded. A workaround may be available. Response time is 4 hours for Premium support customers and 4 business hours for Standard support customers.
  • Major severity: Puppet functionality or performance is not significantly degraded. A workaround may be available. Response time is 12 hours for Premium support customers and 12 business hours for Standard support customers.
  • Minor severity: Puppet is functioning and performing as normal. Use this severity level for a question or informational request. Response time is by the next business day.

Enterprise software 

Puppet Enterprise: Learn which versions of Puppet Enterprise are supported, and more about end-of-life dates. Our team can also help you with supported Puppet Enterprise modules.  

Continuous Delivery (formerly Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise): version 4.x and later   

Security Compliance Management (formerly Comply): We support Security Compliance Management. 

Security Compliance Enforcement (formerly CEM): We support Security Compliance Enforcement. 

Puppet Application Manager (PAM): We support non-legacy architecture versions of PAM used to manage install, access, and manage your Puppet applications.

Open source software

We support our own open source products in conjunction with enterprise Support software as follows:

Bolt: We support Bolt 1.0 and later with other supported Puppet products. However, we don’t support Bolt custom code. If you’re not sure if the issue is with your code or not, submit a case and we’ll help you determine where the problem is. You can ask for help with your code from our community in Slack.

Puppet Development Kit (PDK): We support PDK, but not the code created with it. If you use PDK to write code that doesn’t work but your code passes rspec testing, submit a major severity case so that we can help you figure out if there is an issue with your code. If you use the PDK to write code that doesn’t work, and your code fails rspec testing, it is likely that you have a code issue. You can ask for help with your code from our community, our Slack, and the Puppet users mailing list.

For Support requests for end-of-life (EOL) versions of software, our team replies based on your case severity and entitlement SLA, making a best effort to assist you. We use available content to troubleshoot unsupported versions and configurations but will not create new content. We are unable to recreate your EOL environment.

We do not provide follow-the-sun or blocker severity support for end-of-life (EOL) versions of software. If you open a blocker severity case on an EOL version, we will change it to critical severity.

Once a version has reached EOL, there is no longer an escalation path for feature improvements, bug fixes, or security patches. Other Puppet teams will not engage on EOL versions of products, so there is no escalation to engineering.

The first course of action for an issue with EOL software is likely to update to the latest product version. We encourage you to contact our community for help and to check documentation on our main docs page and our docs archive for EOL versions of our products.

End-of-life versions of enterprise software

Puppet Enterprise: Learn which versions of Puppet Enterprise are supported, and more about end-of-life dates.

Continuous Delivery: Version 3.x and earlier are no longer supported. 

Puppet Enterprise: To manage 11 or more active nodes, purchase and install a license. Contact our sales team to purchase a new license, or to upgrade, renew, or add nodes. If you purchased a license and can’t find it, contact your account manager to get help.

After you purchase a license and install a license key file, your licensed node count and subscription expiration date appear on the License page in the console.  

Continuous Delivery, Security Compliance Management: When you buy Continuous Delivery or Security Compliance Management, we send you information on downloading your license through the Replicated portal. The portal link that you use to download a license and offline installation package is unique to you. If you no longer have the email, contact your account manager to get your credentials. 

Security Compliance Enforcement: Security Compliance Enforcement is available via Forge Premium content modules. Follow the instructions on the About Premium content page to get access to your software and to get information about the token required to use Security Compliance Enforcement. If you forget your Forge password, you can reset it. If you can’t reset it, create a Jira ticket, and select Puppet Forge as the project. In the Jira ticket, include the steps you’ve taken and the errors you see. 

Sign up for instructor-led classes on the Education page. Find links to videos, practice labs, tackle boxes, blogs, documentation, our Knowledge Base, and information on how to get Puppet certified on the Puppet education tab.  

Use our documentation to set up and use your product. 

Find Security Compliance Enforcement documentation here:

At the Support Portal, you can search our Knowledge Base to check for help with your issues. Our articles might either solve your issue, or help you gather more information so that Support can close your case more quickly. If you need help from us directly, open a case at the Support Portal.

Our documentation is a great place to go to learn more about how to set up and use your products.  

If you need to contact us for support by phone and don't have the number, open a support case or get in contact with your account team.

You can get more help from other teams at Puppet or from our community.  

You can level up your Puppet skills with our Education offerings.

To get help with questions that are outside of Support’s domain, such as custom code, third-party modules, and implementation ideas, you can contact our Professional Services team or join our community.  

If you need help reaching your automation goals and helping your team build and scale your automation strategy, use our Technical Account Management service.

You can ask questions and connect with other Puppet users in our community Slack. Connect with other customers using Puppet products by subscribing to the Puppet users mailing list. Check out our community page for more resources. We know you'll learn a lot and enjoy meeting the smart, friendly people who make up the Puppet community.

If you have issues with open-source software, OpenLogic, a Perforce company, can provide support for it. Contact your account manager to see if OpenLogic can help you.