Tag: Cradle support

Cradle support is provided to all customers who have an active maintenance contract. The services are governed by an End User Maintenance Agreement (EUMA) that is provided with all Cradle systems.

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3SL Support and Call Logging

Sources of Information

3SL provides several sources of information should you or your colleagues require some assistance in your usage of Cradle.

However, should you require additional assistance, reporting a bug or suggesting an enhancement, additions to our documentation etc, you can contact 3SL directly via Support Services:

3SL Support Services
3SL Support Services

Contacting 3SL

When seeking support, we suggest assigning a Cradle liaison/Project Administrator as the users’ first point of call as they should already have undergone some form of Cradle training. If this person cannot provide an answer, then our support team will be available to assist.

3SL Support Services

Technical Support Department is available 9am – 5pm GMT Monday to Friday but often also available outside of these hours via email support@threesl.com . Our landline is +44 (0)1229 838867.

Support Call Logging

When communicating with 3SL via email, we will initially assign you a call number and a support engineer to address any problems that you might have. Please provide as much information about this call as possible so we can quickly resolve the call without any misunderstanding. The details that we like to receive are:

  • Name and full contact details
  • Area of Cradle with the problem
  • Your perceived priority for the problem
  • Operating system information
  • Cradle version
  • Means of reproducing the problem

Screenshots, error logs and data (sanitised or raw) are especially welcome to allow us to quickly and easily reproduce any problems.

Any bug reports or enhancements will be tracked in our database and you will be informed when an update is available.

Web Meetings

Should there be any confusion or further information required about a call, you or 3SL may suggest a demonstration via a Web Meeting.

3SL generally uses GoTo Meeting as our meeting platform but we can also use your corporate default platform such as Microsoft Teams.

Cradle Training

3SL offers training courses in the administration and practical usage of Cradle as:

  • Online “public” training interspersed throughout the year
  • On-site or online “private” training

These training courses cover subject areas such as:

  • System Administration
  • Project Administration
  • General User
  • Requirements Management
  • Document Publisher
  • Configuration Management
  • Risk Management
  • Test Management and Execution
  • Systems Modelling

 

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What’s CRADLE_ERRORSTACK?

Environment Variable or Command-line Switch Stack-tracing

As with many complex products Cradle monitors its internal operation and on the rare occasion that something goes wrong it writes information to a log. CRADLE_ERRORSTACK controls how much information is logged internally and output on these occasions.

If in the unfortunate case a Cradle tool crashes, there will often be a log produced in the %CRADLEHOME%\logs\errors directory. This will enable 3SL Support to diagnose simple cases such as a lack of memory on the machine. If the case is more complex, the development team may need to know at which point the program was processing at the time the error occurred. CRADLE_ERRORSTACK will enable additional internal logging that will output a simple execution stack trace into the log. This can aid diagnosis and resolution.

Switching Stack Trace On and Off

CRADLE_ERRORSTACK is an environment variable. You can set it via the control panel’s Advanced system settings (see the screenshot).

In Linux if you are editing the environment config files bashrc, profile, etc for either the system /etc/profile or the user ~/.bashrc then use:

export CRADLE_ERRORSTACK=true

Or as we now set CRADLEHOME in /etc/profile.d/cradle.sh you can put the ‘CRADLE_ERRORSTACK=true’ variable in this file.

Or you could start the Cradle tool from within a command shell, (On Windows®) press windows key type cmd and then in the shell set CRADLE_ERRORSTACK=true, then launch the tool e.g. "%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\work.exe". You can also set a -errorstack parameter to your command line option, i.e. work.exe -errorstack to start WorkBench with the stack on.

Turning on CRADLE_ERRORSTACK environment variable
Environment Variables

Should I leave CRADLE_ERRORSTACK on?

Generally there is no need to leave the stack trace on all the the time. There is a small performance hit if you do, so unless you are having problems we don’t advise you leave it enabled.

What if that still does not sort the issue?

3SL Support may ask you to turn on tracing which produces a complete execution trail from the product. This has a large overhead and uses disk space and is only in used in the very trickiest of issues. Rest assured, it’s unlikely you’ll have to use  it, but if you do there is a post here that explains tracing.

Article UpdateD

27/04/2021 – Using CRADLE_ERRORSTACK in Linux

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Cradle Database Server – CDS Status to 3SL Support

How do I provide CDS status to 3SL support?

If you need to provide information about your Cradle Database Server CDS status to 3SL support you can generate a report from within WorkBench.

If asked to provide information about your current client or server installation, this can be obtained through the The Cradle 'about' or extra information icon ‘About’ button. The resulting screen gives a lot of information about the running system. Additional information for the current ‘Resources’ being consumed by the client or ‘CDS status’ are produced with the buttons at the bottom of the dialog.

Triggering the cds status report
CDS status report

Cradle the Requirements Management and Systems Engineering tool of choice provides full support* to all our Enterprise customers under their maintenance agreement.

Other support options include a large collection of online resources or search the blog’s hints and tips or faq sections.

To contact support, find your local distributor or contact 3SL UK

*Installation support is provided for all our single user configurations. Out of maintenance support must be discussed with our sales team.

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Open Webinars

We propose to start a series of regular, open, webinars in which 3SL staff will be available to answer your questions about 3SL and Cradle. The dates and times of the webinars will be listed in our website and anyone will be welcome to attend. They will be timed to allow as many people to connect as possible, wherever you may be based. The webinars will be in English.

The webinars will be one hour and can include any technical or commercial topics. We may propose some specific topic(s) for the webinar, but the emphasis will primarily be on an opportunity to get answers to your questions.

If you have any opinion on this proposal, please send an e-mail to: mark.walker@threesl.com
or send me a message through LinkedIn!