Below are key pieces of information you’ll be asked for when submitting support requests to Google.
How is this data used?The data and information you provide will be used to troubleshoot the issue you are reporting.
For privacy reasons, we don’t make available to our support agents any user views that show user generated content. Thus, our support agents will not have access to all relevant aspects of the user’s view and context of a reported problem. In order to help resolve your issue quickly, it is critical that they are able to confirm and replicate the issue properly, and in a timely fashion.
The screenshots you provide enable our support agents to confirm the specific reported error or behavior as your users experience it. The exact error messages are helpful for us to quickly narrow the scope of the problem and speed up review of the system log files. They also ensure we clearly document the observed symptoms.
When submitting troubleshooting data to support, please ensure you remove any sensitive data, such as account credentials, government identification numbers, cardholder data, or other sensitive information.
We appreciate your work to include the detailed information in your support request. The complete data you provide enables us to identify the cause and solution to your issue as quickly as possible.
General support template
We'll need the following details to troubleshoot for all reported issues:
- Problem description
- Steps taken so far to troubleshoot
- Is the problem consistent or intermittent?
- Is the issue reproducible on a different machine, operating system, browser, device, and/or network? (Test using different computers at home or at the local library.)
- If reproducible, provide step by step instructions how to reproduce the reported issue
- Legible screenshots displaying the full URL and exact error message/ error condition
- Google product used and version (if applicable), e.g. Gmail or Google Cloud Directory Sync
- Date, time, and timezone when issue occurred
- Affected username(s)
- Operating system type and version (e.g. Microsoft® Windows 10/ Mac® OS X/ Linux®)
- Which Internet security, firewall, anti-virus, or pop-up blocking software is installed on your computer, if any?
- Browser type, version, and add-ons installed (e.g. extensions or toolbars)
Network and server issues
In addition to the items listed above, provide the details requested below for any network latency issues, or server errors.
Network/DNS issuesFor any network latency issue, e.g. accessing mail.google.com, we need to see the outputs of the following commands executed by the affected user:
- nslookup mail.google.com
- nslookup mail.yahoo.com
- nslookup gmail.com
- ping -s 3 mail.google.com (Windows) or ping -c 3 mail.google.com (UNIX)
- ping mail.yahoo.com (Windows) (and stop after three results) or ping -c 3 mail.yahoo.com (UNIX)
- ping -s 3 gmail.com (Windows) or ping -c 3 gmail.com (UNIX)
- tracert mail.google.com (Windows) or traceroute mail.google.com (UNIX)
- tracert mail.yahoo.com (Windows) or traceroute mail.yahoo.com (UNIX)
- tracert gmail.com (Windows) or traceroute gmail.com (UNIX)
- ipconfig /all (Windows) or ifconfig -a (UNIX)
- External IP information (e.g. visit http://whatismyipaddress.com/)
Provide the following additional information for server errors in any application:
- Verify and include the exact date, time, and timezone that the user first experienced an issue.
- Verify that the issue still exists with every communication (since most server errors are temporary).
- How long has the issue persisted? (Issues are only escalated if error messages persist for more than an hour.)
- Try waiting half an hour/ one hour and try again. Does this help? (Most apps will automatically fail over after a few server errors, but this may take several minutes.)
- Include the EXACT error messages and/or status codes.
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