How to use and troubleshoot warranty entitlement checking features in OpenManage Enterprise

This video will demonstrate the use and troubleshoot procedure about warranty entitlement checking features in OpenManage Enterprise.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. My name is Dustin. I am a Subject Matter Expert in the Systems Management space.

Today I will be going over the warranty features in OpenManage Enterprise. You can manage the warranty settings from ‘Application Settings’, ‘Warranty’.

So if we see here we can choose the default of 90 days to show a warning if warranties are expiring in the next 90 days, or you can even show expired warranties or not show expired warranties.

So we can actually view the warranty information itself from ‘Monitor Warranty’ page, and as we can see, we can see our service tags and devices here, what type of warranty we have, the service level, and most importantly the days remaining.

So the process is OpenManage Enterprise queries the warranty API to get a list of warranty SKUs and expiration dates for each discovered asset.

It uses a global API key, so one thing to note is that if there's an API key issue it will affect every single customer not just one.

Warranties are treated as separate line-item SKUs. So as we can see this one right here has one line item, and then another line item, and then if we uh, let's see if we can find another one. Same idea.

We have this plus this for the same device. So one of the things you'll notice is that if the device has an expired warranty, an old expired warranty, it will show those as well.

That's one of the reasons that we have this application setting warranty, to not show them if a customer doesn't want to see them.

So let's talk about how OpenManage Enterprise actually gathers this information from the Dell backend. So step one is OpenManage will create an internal thread, and it's dedicated to warranty, pulling it, then reaches out to our API and it does a key handshake.

It will then create a warranty subtask and from there it will build a query of all the assets, and it will pull the data and display it in OME as we see here. So let's suppose that something's going wrong with all the warranty data.

We're not seeing it, so what do we do to troubleshoot that? So the first thing we're going to want to do is turn on debug logs in the text user interface, i've already done that for the sake of this video.

Then we're going to want a verified connection, so we kind of want to reproduce the issue, make sure that it's going to hit our logs, so we'll actually go here and hit ‘Refresh Warranty’.

From there we can go to ‘Monitor and Audit Logs’ and we're going to export the console logs. And what we'll notice is that in these console logs we have something called the

‘Task Execution Service Log’, so in this log we're going to be able to search for certain things, and really the main thing you want to search for is ‘multitask’ and we can then find where our warranty refresh started, and we can follow this thread.

So you want to follow this thread to see what is happening in that process, right? So something to note here is that almost all issues are customer environment and network configuration issues,

Since all of the OpenManage Enterprise appliances share the same API key and work in the same way. So now if we are having this issue and we can't

Figure out what we need to figure out from the logs themselves we suggest you just go ahead and get a network package capture, then we can really

See if we're able to reach the backend and if the issue lies in the OpenManage Enterprise or if it lies in the network communication between the two. So now let's suppose there's only one device out of all our warranties only one of the devices is showing incorrectly.

Customer knows that they have 635 days remaining but for whatever reason it's showing zero. So the things you'll want to do for that is you'll first want to compare that device to support.dell.com, and to do that you can literally just grab the service tag go to support.com and put it in and see the warranty information.

If the warranty information looks good there then we know there's probably something wrong between the communication.

So what we want to do at that point is actually just escalate. You'll need to get a case created and escalate that up so we can figure out why that's happening. So that's it.

I hope you enjoyed my video going over warranty in OpenManage Enterprise

thank you and have a wonderful day.