Today’s post is a slight break from the technical, and about describing resources at your disposal to find the technical knowledge you’re after. We’ll take a quick tour of the Support Hub knowledge base, what it offers, and how you can interact with it (and Elastic).
The Elastic community boards have long been a technical resource for all kinds of different users (open source, customers, partners, etc). Elasticians and community members share thoughts and guidance on a wide array of topics, like this one.
The Support Hub's "Knowledge Center"
The Knowledge Center inside the Support Hub offers more of this: specific technical guidance Elasticians have learned from the field or by solving issues that affect users. The knowledge exists primarily as “articles” captured, created, and published to share with the community, so users can “self-serve” with what we’ve learned to solve their own challenges more effectively.Access to the Knowledge Center only requires creating a Cloud account with your email address (there are other features available for subscribed customers and Cloud trial users like access to the Support Assistant AI chatbot, but the scope of this post is for features all users can access).
Let’s take a trip inside and look more closely.
Accessing the knowledge inside Support Hub
The Knowledge Center is effectively your portal to whatever you search for within the Support Hub. You can access this directly at Elastic Support Hub with your existing Cloud login, or, inside the Cloud “Home” screen via the search bar in the Support section, below:
Searching and filtering in the Knowledge Center
We’ll search for `ILM errors` to see what kind of articles exist discussing errors related to Index Lifecycle Management. The search box returns a list of results from all the searchable sources in Support Hub, including Documentation, Blogs, beyond just knowledge articles. Here you can see that Documentation links occur first in the results (doc links for several Elasticsearch versions):
We can click onto the different knowledge sources in the Result Type to return content only for the selected type. The Result type is multi-select, so you can return content of only “Knowledge Article”, “Known Issue”, and “Technical Support”, for example. This filters the list to contain knowledge articles, as opposed to including doc links or labs or blogs:
These specific filters for knowledge articles are worth calling out because they’re content written by Elasticians based on an issue they encountered themselves, or on behalf of users in the field. The Elastic Support group in particular publishes a significant amount of general info learned from issues in customer cases that might be helpful to the community. If there is not available info to use to solve an issue, Support Engineers are encouraged to create an article for it. More and more Elastic groups are getting involved with contributing to the knowledge base regularly, so this content will continue to be grown and refined!
Asking about a specific Elastic product error in the Community forums is always an option, but searching for the error against Support Hub articles might return info that someone already encountered about it (with a problem, cause, and solution), so you can fix it yourself. Support Engineers incorporate knowledge practices into our case work, and are continually searching for, creating, and updating the knowledge in Support Hub. You can see by the article result counts of the screenshot above, it’s not insignificant for this example.
Leave your article feedback for us!
In addition to finding knowledge articles to solve your issues, you can provide your opinion to us about the quality of articles. Every knowledge article has a “thumbs up / thumbs down” button and a text field for written feedback. Please let us know if an article was helpful for you or not? By submitting thumbs/up or down, we are able to A) recognize Elasticians who contributed to content that impacted a user positively, and B) make needed improvements if the article came up short or was missing something (written words about the specific gap are helpful here. Feedback is actively monitored to act upon, but we can only improve on the specifics you tell us about!).
So if you are an Elastic Community forum user who has never explored the Cloud or Support Hub areas, we hope a little of this additional insight to what you can find and how we manage it is helpful. If you’ve never created a Cloud account, try registering and searching the Knowledge Center to see if you connect with the content you’re looking for.
Happy holidays!