Cloud Direct For Customers

Introduction from your Service Manager

PTC is excited to introduce this new web portal Cloud Direct to improve the customer experience working with the PTC Cloud environments.

Using Cloud Direct, you can perform self-service actions on your PTC-hosted environments autonomously and securely.  This new version, available today is a pilot version with very limited functionalities.  It is available for PLM, Retail PLM and IoT products.

We hope you will like the UI and be able to navigate easily through the tabs and actions. A help section is there to provide you with guidance on how to navigate and what actions you can perform.

Cloud Direct capabilities

Cloud Direct is a service provided by PTC to hosted customers that enables customers, partners, and PTC resources to take self-service actions against their hosted service and environments.  Cloud Direct aims to reduce dependency on creating human-managed service requests for the most frequent tasks by providing direct and secure self-service access to automated functions to complete tasks.  Access is being rolled out to customers in phases as we work to add features and increase coverage across a wide range of PTC products and solutions.

Here is a summary of the features available to you today in Cloud Direct:

• You can quickly restart your non-production environments and take system snapshots on demand without the need for a service request.  (Temporarily for PLM customers only).
• When logging a service request or incident in Support Assistant, you will have the option to select the appropriate hosted environment.  Doing so will reduce investigation times on these requests by providing detailed diagnostic data to the Technical Support Engineer.
• View status of cases open for your hosted service or for service requests and incidents linked directly to affected environments.  This makes it easy to organize your cases and jump directly into the eSupport case details from your environment in Cloud Direct.
• Manage user access for your company.  You can easily add additional users to your development environments, allowing them to run self-service actions.
• View announcements from your Service Manager.  As we announce improvements to your service, new features to Cloud Direct, or changes to processes, we will post them to our news section, which will ensure you see the appropriate information for tailored to your PTC hosted service. 

When to use Cloud Direct

Cloud Direct is intended to be your first point of contact for interacting with your hosted service.  Our goal is to provide you with direct and secure access to your service requests and incidents, system and usage reporting and dashboards, and self-service actions for your hosted environments.  This introductory May 2023 release provides a small but important set of features to start.  We recommend that you start using these features today, and all new capabilities as they are rolled out to your service in the coming months and year.  New features will be announced on the News page in Cloud Direct.

How PTC uses Cloud Direct

PTC support services benefit immediately from your adoption of Cloud Direct.  When linking a service request or incident, the engineer is given immediate access to diagnostic information such as log files, properties files, and configuration history.  This allows the engineer to immediately start resolving the case.

How to get help with Cloud Direct

The Help section of Cloud Direct provides you with three important options:

• To report an issue or ask a question about Cloud Direct, simply access My PTC Assistant.  A Technical Support Representative will assist you with all Cloud Direct support needs.
• To suggest a feature or provide feedback, send us an email with the Feedback link.
• To review your hosted service documentation, consult the Cloud Engagement Guide.

What is next for Cloud Direct

Cloud Direct will be rolling out new features in batches on a quarterly basis.  The next two releases have already begun development.  Here are just a few features that we are working on for our summer and fall releases:

• You will be able to download your usage reports on demand
• IoT customers will be able to access their non-production environment log files whenever needed
• You will be able to view and schedule your environment maintenance schedules
• You can manage your software and system access requests
• You can submit your new configuration builds and review your deployment history