Archives: Service News

Changes to the underlying billable time infrastructure Nebula uses to support Nebula consulting charges have occurred. This email outlines some of the consequences for Nebula customers.

What and When:

UW-IT began retiring the help request tool called RT a year ago, replacing it with a new system called UW Connect. Up until June 30, 2015, Nebula used RT to report billable time for consulting. On July 1, 2015, UW-IT discontinued the billable time capability of RT and replaced it with a similar capability in UW Connect. The new billable time capability in UW Connect does not work exactly the same as the old billable time capability in RT. The most notable difference is that there is no “budget approver” functionality. This was a functionality that allowed someone previously designated as a “budget approver” for a given budget to be alerted to new billable time records by automatically adding them to the email interactions.

What you need to do:

There is no action you must take, this announcement is informational only. You might choose to implement workarounds to meet any lost value due to this change.

More info:

Nebula billable time results from consulting charges when a request isn’t covered by the core Nebula desktop rate and we bill for the time spent to bring such a request to resolution. When this is the case, we ask for a valid budget and notify the customer that the request will result in additional charges.

For billable time, you should see the same level of detail in the monthly TSE bills that are generated.

The billing mechanism is owned by UW-IT Business and Finance. The decision to not provide an authorization/notification mechanism was made by UW-IT Business and Finance due to the lack of a central authority for all UW budgets for billable activities, as well as technical constraints in customizing the new help request system. Nebula’s previous authorization/notification capability was unique among UW-IT billable charges and required a highly customized tool to support it.

I recognize that this change represents less functionality, and many customers relied on the notification mechanism to have a higher degree of confidence about charges being incurred or to intercept requests for which your department has special procedures. UW-IT will definitely work with customers on charges that are not appropriate or excessive. If you’d like for us to track specific kinds of requests for your department and redirect those kinds of requests for help to you, please do let us know about those–we do track that kind of information already and are happy to expand this. Another workaround you might consider is to ask your users to copy you on their email to help@uw.edu–you would then be part of the interaction if we need to ask for a budget.

On a positive note, this change means Nebula support staff are no longer using two different help request systems to track your requests. Using both for a year has been a strain on us.

Back on 5/7, Nebula first asked that every department provide an eligibility group to update our records so we can accurately grant access and bill only for your current users. Many departments haven’t yet been able to provide an eligibility group. This has blocked our ability to purge old users, even for those departments that have provided an eligibility group. So Nebula is taking action on some department’s behalf to enable the service to move forward by creating temporary eligibility groups.

What and When:

This week we’ll be creating a temporary eligibility group for those Nebula departments which haven’t provided one to us yet. Initial membership for this temporary eligibility group will be based on our existing user department data at the point the group is created.

What you need to do:

When your department is ready to provide and assume management of an eligibility group of your Nebula users, we can rename and assign administration of the temporary eligibility group to you. Until that point, the membership and management of that temporary eligibility group will be frozen. Just send in a request when you are ready to do that.

Alternatively, you can also supply your own eligibility group and override the temporary eligibility group we’ve created. In that case, our temporary eligibility group will go away. If you’d like to provide your own eligibility group for your department, contacts for Nebula departments should visit https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx to supply that information. http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/tools/view-and-manage-nebula-resources/#changeeligibility steps you through the process, if you need additional help.

If you are in the process of creating and populating your eligibility group, you’ll know we’ve created a temporary one if you see the field populated when you visit https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx. Feel free to override the value if that’s the case. J

More info:

Creating these temporary eligibility groups will allow Nebula to move forward on purging a large set of old users. This purge won’t be as complete as it could be with department provided eligibility groups from every department, but it will meet the service needs.

A MyIT release which permits adding budget information for group directories and default budgets for users and desktops is now available.

What and When:

As of this morning, MyIT includes new capabilities to set budget information along with some other updates. The changes include:

• On the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula File Services” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/fileServices.aspx, there is now the ability to set budget on a per file directory basis.
• On each individual department page accessible from the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Departments” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx, there is now the ability to set a default user budget and a default desktop budget. The default user budget applies to any user in your department who doesn’t otherwise have a budget assigned—this would apply to a user home directory. The default desktop budget applies to any desktop in your department that doesn’t otherwise have a budget assigned.
• On the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Users in My Department” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaUsers.aspx, there is now a column indicating whether the user is a current faculty/staff.

What you need to do:

You can now review the budget information assigned to group directories, home directories, and desktops and adjust them as needed. For group directories and home directories, there is no existing budget so you will need to assign a budget to those items. Keep in mind that for home directories you can leverage the default user budget to assign a budget to all user home directories in your department.

More info:

Nebula is providing drop-in visit times to help customers navigate what they need to do. The drop-in visit times are listed here:

http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/news/

More times will be added as necessary.

A general page that provides more detailed assistance on how to View and Manage Your Nebula Resources is at http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/tools/view-and-manage-nebula-resources/.

A MyIT release which includes estimated monthly FY16 costs is now available.

What and When:

As of Wednesday, MyIT includes new information on the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Departments” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx. Department contacts will see 4 new columns on that page for each department representing estimated FY16 costs for desktops, group directories, home directories, and a total FY16 monthly cost. The total is side-by-side with the current monthly cost allowing for easy comparison.

NOTE: estimated are based on preliminary FY16 rates for the Nebula Managed Desktop service and are subject to Management Accounting & Analysis (MAA) review and approval.

What you need to do:

You can review your estimated costs and if necessary take actions to reduce your usage to reduce your future costs.

NOTE: Estimated home directory costs are the least accurate component. This number includes users associated with your department which are long gone. Those “old” home directories will be purged in the future after you give us an eligibility group. In the coming weeks, we plan to purge “old” home directories in bulk across all Nebula departments, removing any Nebula account not in those eligibility groups. So take this into account when reviewing the home directory estimated cost. Except for urgent user removals, we ask that you not ask us to delete “old” home directories at this time—it’ll save us all a lot of time and costs to defer that to a one-time purge. J

More info:

Getting us that eligibility group is important. If you need help getting a Groups Service home group under “uw”, e.g. “uw_pottery”, for your eligibility group, we can help streamline that process. Send us a request and we’ll facilitate the request fulfillment process with the Groups Service team for you. We’d like to purge your old home directories. Help enable us to do that. J

NOTE: the eligibility group is intended to represent any of your users which need access to Nebula resources. This would include people in your department but might also need to include accounts that are not people, such as a Shared UW NetID. If the user needs access to one of the following, then it should be included: Nebula VPN, Nebula home directory, Nebula group directory, Nebula desktop.

A future MyIT release will provide the ability to input budget information for Nebula file service costs.

In the future, after the future MyIT release just mentioned, Nebula plans to call department contacts that haven’t provided an eligibility group and budget info for Nebula file service costs, to help make sure we have that information to enable continued service.

Our existing assignment of group directories has some inflexibility in its design. We are working on a more flexible design. We don’t believe this affects a lot of customers, but it is important to us because it is important to some of you. We hope to have a solution to this before we bill at the end of July. If we don’t, we’ll provide a workaround which will minimize the impact to customers.

Preliminary FY16 rates for the Nebula Managed Desktop service are available.

What and When:

As of late yesterday, preliminary FY16 rates for the Nebula Managed Desktop service were submitted to Management Accounting & Analysis (MAA). MAA provides final review and approval of rates for all cost-recovery centers at the UW.

We believe these rates will be approved, but they are not final until MAA approval. We will notify you only if these preliminary rates are not approved.

The preliminary rates are:

• Nebula desktop rate: $34.50/desktop/month
• Nebula file storage: $.25/GB/month

The other Nebula rates (Consulting, Nebula Windows file service, and Nebula training room for non-Nebula customers) are unchanged.

What you need to do:

If you haven’t provided an eligibility group for your department (and very few of you have), you really need to do that. Contacts for Nebula departments should visit https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx to supply that information. This will tell us who your active users are. If you need help with this, please contact us for help.

More info:

Our desire is that no one manage user removals manually by contacting us with a long list of users to remove, unless there is an urgent need to disable access. If there is no urgent need, then you should use the new process we are establishing. That new process is that you give us an eligibility group. In bulk across all Nebula departments, we remove any Nebula account not in those eligibility groups.

We plan to make those removals before FY16 starts, and there should be more communication about that.

We plan to have an update to MyIT next week which provides you estimated costs for FY16 based on existing use. There will be more communication about that.

The MyIT portal has been updated.

What and When:

This morning, several changes to the MyIT portal were published.

The changes included are:

• Nebula Departments page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar, under ‘IT Things I Own/Manage’.
• Department Detail page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar, under ‘IT Things I Own/Manage’, under ‘Nebula Departments’, when you click on a department listed.
• Group Sync Info page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar
• ‘Export to csv’ capability sprinkled across more pages.

What you need to do:

We have a variety of things we are asking those that consider themselves a contact for a Nebula department to do.

1. Help us get the Nebula contacts in order. Go to https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx and review what departments are listed. Our contact information is in a sad state of affairs, and we need your help to get it updated. There is more info below which may be useful.
2. Provide a list of active eligible Nebula users for your department. These are users that your department is willing to pay for the associated costs, and for which you would like their access to Nebula resources to continue. Create a group in the Groups Service (https://groups.uw.edu) which has all of these users as members. Then add it to your department via the myDepartmentDetail page noted above (e.g. https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myDepartmentDetail.aspx?department=pottery if your department was pottery).

We’ll be sending a separate email to anyone currently listed as a contact, to ensure that all who might need to hear about this get the message.

More info:

General Questions/issues you may have

• “I don’t know why you think I’m a contact for a Nebula department, please remove me.” We’d ask you to provide a better contact, if you are able. Maybe your manager knows? If not, you can remove yourself or ask us to.
• “Our department hasn’t had that name for several years, can you rename it?” Absolutely. Just send us a request via help@uw.edu.
• “We’ve had reorganizations and this Nebula department is now spread across several department you don’t know about.” We can help with that. Just send us a request via help@uw.edu.

Department Contact Info

The state of the Nebula department contact information is not good. We worked hard at populating some best-guess contacts for Nebula departments which had none recorded–relying on service team experience and some data analysis, but I am certain that much of our contact information is faulty. Having valid information about the contacts for your department is important so we can provide you the services you need. We really appreciate your time helping us help you. J

Here’s a reference for choosing which individual fills the following roles for your Nebula department:

• Billing contact: this is the person who gets bills for this department. They may need to access MyIT for billing data.
• Owner contact: this is the person who makes decisions for this department. They may need to access MyIT for a variety of data.
• Tech contact: this is the person who provides local IT support for this department. They may need to access MyIT for IT management data.
• Tech contact alternate: this is a backup for the tech contact.

Department User Info

Similarly, the state of our information about Nebula department users is not good. But don’t take my word for it—see https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaUsers.aspx, which lists all the users we think are “active” for your department. I think you’ll agree that we need some help getting that cleaned up. That’s why we’re asking you to provide and maintain a group of users associated with your Nebula department that are eligible for Nebula services. We’ll use what you provide to clean up, and looking ahead to FY16 only charge your department for the users who you tell us are active and eligible. In the future, you’ll maintain that group to remove Nebula services for that user at the time you choose or to add additional users.

We suggest that the group name (the group id) end with _nebula_eligibleusers, e.g. uw_pottery_nebula_eligibleusers might be all the Nebula eligible users from the pottery department. If you need help using the Groups Service, help@uw.edu can assist, or you can read the documentation noted at https://groups.uw.edu.

One tip to consider with regard to maintaining that group: if all your eligible users should be employees, you can use a dependency group of “uw_employee”. If you do this, when a member of your group drops out of the uw_employee group, they will automatically be removed from membership in your group. The uw_employee group is automatically maintained based on university data around employment, with members removed at the 2nd pay period after their termination date.

A change to our service catalog entry occurred.

What and When:

On Saturday, March 21^st an updated service catalog entry was published at https://depts.washington.edu/uwtscat/manageddesktop.

What you need to do:

Nothing. This is purely an advisory to you that we’ve updated the catalog entry that describes the service, so you aren’t caught off-guard.

More info:

This update isn’t intended to introduce any significant change to what the service provides, but rather was a refactor of our catalog description to more accurately represent what we are providing. As an example, one topic that came up recently on the nebula-discuss mailing list—OS support practices–is now clearly called out.

I plan to update the catalog entry when we make service design changes that impact what’s there. So for example, assuming we separate Nebula file services from the core package, we’d update the catalog to represent that change at the same time we adjust the FY2016 rate information tied to that change.

If you have concerns or questions about this update, please send email to help@uw.edu with “Nebula service catalog update” in the subject line.

A change to our phone practices is planned.

What and When:

On Monday, April 6^th Nebula will change its phone practices.

When you call the UW-IT Service Center (221-5000), the service center staff will do the same initial triage they’ve always done when you call for any UW-IT services. If they can’t easily resolve the issue, they’ll create a request record for Nebula in UW Connect and end the phone call, just as they do for every other UW-IT service. Nebula service staff will see your request and begin work. In some cases, they’ll call you back, in other cases, they’ll correspond using email from UW Connect.

The expectations you can have for our response will remain the same—we’ll respond in less than 4 hours during business hours, and we’ll continue to treat incidents urgently.

What you need to do:

Nothing. This is purely an advisory to you that we’re changing our practices so you aren’t caught off-guard.

If there is urgency associated with your request, you are encouraged to let the UW-IT Service Center staff know that when you phone. This will result in the request being marked as more urgent, with a different level of response from Nebula.

More info:

We believe this change will reduce the number of times you have to repeat information to Nebula staff that you previously gave the service center staff, as well as eliminate awkward pauses while we pull up any information that may or may not have been captured in a phone interaction prior to our staff being on the line. Put another way, this gives us a little extra time to be prepared to help you with your specific issue, instead of wasting some of your time while we come up to speed.

We believe it makes sense to have the UW-IT Service Center specialize in answering phone calls, giving us more time to focus on fulfilling your requests and improving the service. Improvements that the UW-IT Service Center makes will be realized by Nebula. By removing ourselves from that initial phone call activity, we believe there will be improved consistency across all UW-IT services.

If you have concerns or questions about this planned change, please send email to help@uw.edu with “Nebula phone practice change” in the subject line.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the customer meeting! Our initial foray into recording the meeting failed, so we don’t have a recording to share. But we’ll try again next time, hopefully with more success.

Here are some notes from the meeting.

—————–

Nebula Customer Spring Meeting, Mar 5, 2015

Brian Arkills, Service Manager for Nebula Managed Workstation presented a Powerpoint presentation based on the topics discussed in the most recent Newsletter.

Presentation summary:

1. Folks who wish to continue receiving the newsletter should join the nebula-discuss mailing list.  See https://it.uw.edu/wares/nebula/contact-us/  for more information on communication options including nebula-announce.
2. We’ve clarified the auto-response situation so you now have only one REF # for any request.
3. Your Nebula billings have moved to the Non-Recurring tab of the Technology Service & Equipment bill; this is temporary while we work out some infrastructure changes, then they will be back on the Recurring tab.
4. Corrupt Outlook profile workaround published; more self-help docs coming.
5. Nebula2 -> NetID user conversion:  volunteer now for more help and date flexibility; in 6 mos we will be assigning conversion dates. This change is very important for retiring old equipment and making future improvements, such as making package development more readily available between campus units.
6. We hope for a small rate reduction in FY16 (starts 7/1/2015) to reflect lower costs, plus we will separate file storage service from the core service, so you will pay for only the space you use (in both H: and I: drives)
7. What’s next:
   1. Mac VPN – we will be changing the design of the VPN so that Mac users have easier access.
   2. We will start billing out of UW Connect, the new ticket managing system.
   3. Windows 10!
   4. Data encryption with Azure RMS pilot – let us know if you’re interested!

Questions

1. Q: Can you help us moving group memberships from Nebula to NETID groups?  A: Yes.
2. Q: what do we do with training room (or conference room) computers? A: ask us to change the default domain login to NETID.
3. Q: if I’ve never used Nebula2 logins, do I have to worry about NETID logins?  A: no, you’re already doing the right thing.
4. Q: Where are the Google storage and retention limits and policies on line (couldn’t find on Google Apps page)? A: we will publish this on the IT Connect page.
5. Q: Is mapping the My Documents folder to the H: drive going to go away (please say yes)?  A: it’s already gone if you’re using Windows 8.  (Straw poll showed no other interest in getting rid of the mapping in Windows 7.)
6. Q: Can we map a drive to Google?  A: no, but you can set up a sync process so you have a local folder that syncs to your Google drive.
7. Q: What can you tell us about the H: vs U: drives?  A: it’s the same GPFS infrastructure, but different environments; in fact Nebula’s is a little behind.  U: drive now has 20GB free space available.
8. Q: Can we use U: drive as a replacement for H:?  A: yes. (You can even map a drive to it.)
9. Q: How can we see file space usage (H: and I: drives)?  A: your department contact will be able to see it; more on that soon.
10. Q: Can you help us help our users manage their passwords? A: yes; we’ve looked at LastPass Enterprise license (widespread interest in audience for this).  Password can be passed to end-user, but not revealed to them.

Comments

1. Google: it’s more difficult for group sharing.  Will be a learning curve.  Does integrate with UW Groups.
2. Still some departments who can’t upgrade IE due to vendor issues (Medisys, Eprocurement, OHM, MyChem)
3. Windows 10: we are in the early adopter program.  Win10 will have both IE and a new browser.  We’re hoping it’ll have better in-place upgrade options from Win 7 and Win 8.
4. Many VPN users haven’t transitioned to new VPN because they’re using systems that haven’t needed a rebuild.  We need to have you using the correct VPN;  instructions are here.