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General - What happens when we raise a support ticket?

When we experience a problem with Power Apps, how do we raise an official support ticket, and what should we expect after we raise a ticket? In this post, I provide an overview of this process.

If you've ever wondered what happens when we raise a support ticket with Microsoft, here's an review of the process, based on a ticket that I raised in 2020.

Where to raise the support ticket

To raise a ticket, the quickest way is to visit the following support web page.
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/support/

Towards the bottom of this page, there's a link that says ‘create support ticket’. This link opens a 'contact' form that we can complete.

Here's what the contact form looks like. From here, we enter our contact details and a description of our problem. From the problem subject that we enter, the form will search for similar questions on the forums and in knowledgebase articles. The results at this stage may answer our question.

What happens after we raise a ticket?

If the search process doesn't provide an answer, the ticket will be escalated to the support team. In my example, I raised a ticket to report a bug that I experienced with the import control.

Here's a screenshot of the issue that I encountered. The import control would not allow the retrieval of imported data through the data property. It displayed an error when I attempted to do carry out this task.


I raised this ticket late one evening. By the morning, I received an email from a support engineer called Emmanuel. Emmanuel remained my point of contact throughout this process.

My ticket was assigned a ticket number, a severity rating, and an ETA resolution time (shown beneath).
  • Title:    Import control not working
  • Support request number:    120090821004982
  • Severity rating:    C
  • Expect response within:    8 hours

The following working times of the support team were also specified:
7AM – 4PM UTC
Mon - Fri

Diagnosis and resolution of the ticket

As the first step, Emmanuel set up a Teams meeting with 4 other engineers. It found it very encouraging that a team of engineers were involved with my ticket.

The initial process was slow, mainly because it took time for me to explain the problem and there were several modifications that we needed to carry out in order to rule out possible causes (eg renaming all controls, calling combinations of different functions such as Collect rather than ClearCollect)

Following the initial meeting, we carried out at least 2 additional meetings. Frustratingly, the support team were initially unable to recreate the issue that I demonstrated.

With much help from the engineers, we were eventually able to work out the problem between us.

The cause was due to an obscure browser compatibility bug. In order to use the import control, the control needed to be initially added to a screen using the Chrome browser. So long as the control was initially added in Chrome, it would work on all browsers (and the Windows 10 player) from that point onwards.

At the end of this process, Emmanuel wrote-up a summary of the issue ,shown beneath:
•    You stated that you were not able to use the import button control as it always shows an error and fails to fetcth the imported collection.
•    We went on a call together and had the same experience using the Edge and Firefox browser.
•    We came back on the call, created a new app using the chrome browser. This time around, the export and import button control worked as expected.
•    We saved and published the app.
•    We went back to the edge and firefox browsers played the app and also used the data table. This time around, everything worked as expected.
•    You gave consent to close the ticket.

Conclusion

Within two days, the Microsoft engineers diagnosed the problem and provided a workaround. I was very impressed with the effort and the number of team members that were involved in helping to fix this problem. The level of professionalism was impeccable.

Ultimately, the one thing I'm most pleased about is that as a result of this interaction, Microsoft have now fixed this bug and it no longer exists today.
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