Get access to the MacStadium portal
You open tickets and restart Macs from the MacStadium portal. Each person on your service desk needs their own portal user account. Ask an admin on your MacStadium account to add you. Admins can limit which parts of the portal each user can see, for example to keep billing hidden. See Add a new user to your MacStadium account. If your organization signs in to MacStadium with single sign-on, your IT team grants access through your identity provider instead. See SAML single sign-on.Before you open a ticket
Most issues can be resolved, or at least narrowed down, by your team. Work through these checks first, and note what you tried so you can include it in the ticket.1
Check how you're connecting
Screen Sharing doesn’t work directly over the internet: inbound TCP 5900 is blocked at the MacStadium network edge for all hosted Macs. Screen Sharing is also turned off when a Mac is delivered, so it has to be turned on over SSH first. Connect through an SSH tunnel, or over your private network or VPN if you have one. See Connect to Screen Sharing over an SSH tunnel.If SSH password logins suddenly fail with the correct password, the Mac may have locked password logins after repeated failed attempts from the internet. A reboot or a password reset doesn’t clear this. Open a ticket for the Mac, and MacStadium clears it.
2
Restart the Mac from the portal
The portal shows whether the Mac is powered on, and can power it on or off. If the Mac shows as off, power it on before you try anything else.If the Mac isn’t responding at all, for example SSH connections time out, use Hard Reboot in the portal. It briefly cuts and restores power to that Mac, which then starts up on its own. If FileVault is turned on, the Mac stops at the FileVault unlock screen instead. On macOS 26 Tahoe, unlock it by signing in over SSH. On earlier versions, SSH and Screen Sharing stay down, so say in your ticket that FileVault is on. See Hard reboot a MacStadium Mac from the portal.If SSH still works and you only need a restart, use
sudo fdesetup authrestart instead of Hard Reboot, so a FileVault Mac skips the unlock screen.3
Check the Mac's network graphs
In the portal, open the Mac from Bare Metal Mac and select its Analytics tab. It shows network graphs for the last hour, day, week, or month (Throughput, Packets, Drops/Errors, and Status Changes), plus gauges for Internet Bandwidth Utilization, Interface Errors, and Interface Discards. A link that keeps going down, or a jump in errors, points to a network problem rather than macOS. Note what you see so you can include it in the ticket.
4
Check network connectivity
Confirm whether the problem is the Mac or the path to it. Check your VPN connection, and run a traceroute to see where the connection stops. See Troubleshooting connectivity issues.
5
Check your MDM configuration
If the Mac is enrolled in your mobile device management (MDM) solution, confirm that the profiles and policies applied to it are the ones you expect. A recent policy change can affect login, network, or app behavior.
6
Check macOS version compatibility
Confirm that the macOS version on the Mac is supported by the apps, agents, and MDM profiles your users rely on, especially after a macOS update.
7
Check the MacStadium status page
See status.macstadium.com for scheduled maintenance or outages in your data center.
Open a ticket for a specific Mac
If the checks don’t resolve the issue, open a MacStadium support ticket from the portal. When tickets are picked up depends on your support plan. See MacStadium support tiers.1
Go to the Support Center
Log in to portal.macstadium.com, then click Support Center in the bottom-left corner.
2
Create the ticket
Click Create Ticket in the upper-right corner. Select the subscription for the affected Mac from the dropdown, so the ticket is tied to that Mac.
3
Describe the issue
Select the ticket type and describe the issue. Include:
- Which Mac is affected, as it appears in the portal
- What your end user saw, and when it started
- What you already tried from Before you open a ticket, and the result
- Whether other Macs are affected
4
Track the ticket
Click Create Ticket. You can follow responses, add details, and close the ticket from the same Support Center.
If your organization tracks issues in its own ticketing system, such as ServiceNow, open the MacStadium ticket in the portal separately and record the MacStadium ticket number in your internal ticket.
Request a new Mac
To add a Mac, contact your MacStadium Account Manager, or MacStadium Sales if you don’t have one. They send a Service Order for your team to sign. MacStadium then provisions the Mac and lets you know when it’s online. If MacStadium sets up software on new Macs for you, such as the Citrix VDA, the setup finishes after the Mac is online, using details only your team has:1
Get the details from your admins
For Citrix, that’s a Citrix Cloud enrollment token for the Machine Catalog the Mac belongs in. Your Citrix admins generate the token in Web Studio. See Generate an enrollment token. Each token is single-use, so you need one for each new Mac. The token is shown only once and expires, so ask for it when the Mac is online, not before.
2
Send them in a ticket for the new Mac
Open a ticket for the new Mac’s subscription and include the token. If it expires before MacStadium uses it, MacStadium asks for a new one. Select the sensitive information checkbox, since the ticket contains a credential.