Tips for Submitting Help Desk Tickets

From Pawsey’s own Help Desk Service wiki page:

Please aim to provide as much background as possible in your email. For example, if you have a problem using a particular system, make sure to let us know your username and project group, the system you are using, and the command, task or operation for which you are encountering a problem. If you see an error message or other output, please include this also. We will let you know if we need more information, though we can often resolve your enquiry more quickly if you provide all of the required information in the first instance.

With that in mind, below is a mock/example/template you could base your ticket on if you like. This is just a rough guide / prompt to get you to think about the sort of info which you could provide to give the Help Desk staff member the best chance of understanding the issue and helping resolve it quickly without too much back and forth.

TL;DR:

Use the template as a start
Ensure your subject line reflects the nature of the ticket
Attach any relevant logs or scripts

When writing a ticket, please always be courteous, kind and respectful to the human being who will be assigned your ticket!

To: help@pawsey.org.au
Subject: <<Make sure the subject line reflects the nature of the ticket>>
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Dear Help Desk,

<<Briefly describe the problem in words, when it started happening, if it impacts more tha just you.>>

I was wondering if someone could please take a look and see what the problem might be?

Here are the details of the job(s) that are failing:
  Username: <<your username>>
  Project: <<your project>>
  Cluster/Parition: <<cluster/partition>>
  Example failing JobIDs: <<jobids>>
  The SBATCH script I run is attached.
  Error output: 
  <<provide details of the error>
  Full job/error logs are in: <<path to error logs>> <<(or are attached if you are worried about scratch purge policy removing them!)>>
  <<If the issue is to do with failed data transfers or connectivity, please also include where you are connecting from/to>>

Please do let me know if you require any further information. 

Thanks in advance,

<<Your name>>

And here is an example:

To: help@pawsey.org.au
Subject: Permission denied error when writing file
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Help Desk,

I have a job which has started failing recently with a strange error message. The job is used by my whole team of 6 researchers and we are all experiencing the same issue.
We have used this job in the past many times and don't think anything has changed with the SBATCH script or directories it uses recently.
It seems to fail at the line where it is trying to write out a log file. We first noticed the error around 29-Feb-2024. 

I was wondering if someone could please take a look and see what the problem might be?

Here are the details of the jobs that are failing:
  Username: aperson
  Project: projectABC
  Cluster/Parition: Garrawarla/workq
  Example failing JobIDs: 12345678, 12345679, 12345680
  The SBATCH script I run is attached to the ticket.
  Error output:
"Attempting to write file...
ERROR: failed to write to /path/to/failed/file.txt - permission denied"
  Full job/error logs are in /scratch/projectabc/aperson/12345678.out (plus logs 12345679.out and 12345680.out)

Please do let me know if you require any further information. 

Thanks in advance,

A Person