Cisco TAC Best Practices - Ask Me Anything Event

[Community Moderator]

Ask Me Anything Forum

During this event our TAC engineers will answer your questions related to Cisco Technical Assistant Services (TAC): TAC Engineer’s responsibilities, case handling, troubleshooting approach, escalation chain, tips & tricks. Experts will NOT address TAC cases or technology related questions.

Get high-quality, valuable insights, and best practices on how to utilize TAC services. The session allows to have a better understanding of how to work with TAC most effectively and what value they get from TAC support!

To participate in this event, please use the  button below to ask your questions

Ask questions from Wednesday, June 23 to Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Featured Experts

Vasilii Mikhailovskii is a Technical Consulting Engineer in the Cisco HTTS (High Touch Technical Support) for Routing and Switching in EMEAR. The team supports technologies: Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), multicast, multicast VPN (mVPN), intelligent WAN (iWAN), Quality of Service (QoS), Network Address Translation (NAT), Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), Locator / ID Separation Protocol (LISP), etc. Vasilii has over 16 years of experience in networking and over 5 years as a Cisco TAC engineer. He holds Cisco CCIE, CCDE and Microsoft MCITP certifications.

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Sharon Tom is a Leader in the Cisco TAC for Security in EMEAR. Sharon has over 12 years of experience in networking and over 10 years in different roles in Cisco. He holds Cisco CCIE Collaboration, CCNP Voice, VMwareVCP v5.0, and other certificates.

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[vamikhai]

Q1a: any training/edu about Complexity Levels?. Since Cisco is chasing this it would be quite neccessary to have?

Q1b: we are reviewing our cases and learned that here are also "Complexity Levels" 0-3. Since we are PSS we are only supposed to use TAC in complexity level 3. Will you talk anything about those levels? (not to mix with Severity)

Thanks to all who brought this up during the session. Indeed - we need to talk about this topic, since it's quite important for partner network.

Here is a brief explanation of the complexity levels as they are defined in TAC:

Level	Description	SR characteristics	Comments/Examples
Level 0	Very simple, procedural/using playbook; typically resolved on a first call	Same-day resolution No special technical knowledge required Documented procedures	Software download Licensing (per documentation) Password reset/recovery
Level 1	Simple, but beyond a playbook	Documented problems with technologies that can be resolved with technical knowledge/troubleshooting	HW failure verification / DoA confirmation Configuration assistance Triage between Cisco and 3rd party device
Level 2	Requires certified resources with specialized education/training	Skilled analytical problem solving, complex research and diagnostic path Identify known or new defects Complex production environment with complex business requirements/background	Performance issues; Interoperability problems; Protocol traces; RCA to known defects that previously were not fully documented.
Level 3	Top complexity, typically requiring interaction with developers	Significant research time complex lab scenario New defects of significant complexity requires in-depth understanding of  product components	repro required complex lab environment; Cisco developers involved into diagnostic/RCA; interoperability issues that could not be diagnosed based on generic logs or traffic patterns.

PSS partners are expected to take care of levels 0-2 and only complexity level 3 should be opened to Cisco TAC.

However we found out, that level assigned is a bit subjective (and varies from engineer  to engineer).

PS: appeal process details will follow shortly.

[linda.elphick@bt.com]

Where can we find the documented appeal process?