Ticket for IT support: what to send when your trading VPS drops

A good ticket for IT support when a trading VPS drops offline names the exact time it went down, the lat heartbeat you saw, every open position with its ticket number and stop, and the last lines of the EA journal. Send those four things and the fixer skips the back and forth. While you wait, check live trades from the broker's own terminal.

Use the free IT support template

Deal with live trades first

Open the MT5 mobile app or your broker's web terminal and look at the account before you write anything. The VPS is down, but the account is not. Positions are still open at the broker, and nothing on your side is managing them.

What that means in practice:

• A position with a stop loss and take profit stored on the brokker's server is still protected. A stop that an EA was going to add or trail after entry is not, because the EA is not running.
• Pending orders are still live. The news filter in your rksk guard is also off, so a pending order can trigger into a release you would normally have blocked.
• Drawdown locks and session limits are not being enforced. Check the daily loss figure against your prop firm's dashboard yourself until the VPS is back.
• If the bridge receives TradingView alerts, find out whether aleerts fired during the outage were dropped or queued. That depends on how your bridge ingests them, so put the quesgion in the ticket. A queued entry replaying onto a position you already closed by hand is how one outage becomes two.

Decide per position: leave it, add a stop, or close it. Your firm's rules on manual intervention differ, so read yours before you click. Write down what you did, because the ticket needs it.

Capture evidence before anyone reboots

Rebooting clears the state that expoains the failure. Take these before you or the provider restart anything:

1. A screenshot of the Experts and Journal tabs in MT5, if you can reach the machine.
2. The log files. In MT5, File, Open Data Folder, then copy the files in Logs and MQL5\Logs.
3. The uptime monitor's history for the VPS, with timestamps.
4. The VPS provider's status page and any maintenance email from the same window.

Use UTC in everything you write. Broker server time often differs from UTC, and a ticket that says "around 3pm" costs an hour of matching timestamps.

What belongs in the ticket

A ticket that says "VPS down, please help" starts a conversation. A ticket with the fields below starts a fix. The table shows each field and what it saves.

The symptom dropdown does the most work. "Can't connect over RDP" is a provider or network problem. "MT5 is running but the EA shows no activity" is on your side of the VPS. Without that answer, the fixer starts at the top of the stack every time.

Here is the shape of a finished ticket as a payload. The values are made up, but the structure is what you want arriving in your tracker or Slack:

{
  "outage_start_utc": "2026-11-05T13:42:00Z",
  "last_heartbeat_utc": "2026-11-05T13:41:10Z",
  "symptom": "RDP unreachable",
  "accounts": ["challenge_1", "funded_2"],
  "positions_open": true,
  "positions": "XAUUSD buy 0.50 SL 2331.40 TP none, ticket 51827346",
  "handled_manually": "SL added from phone at 13:55 UTC",
  "recent_changes": "Windows update installed overnight",
  "priority": "urgent"
}

Where the form sits in the stack

In the Prop-Firm Algo Execution Stack, your TradingView strategy reaches MT5 through a private bridge, with a risk-guard EA and a monitored VPS underneath. Monitoring tells us the machine stopped answering. It cannot tell us what you see on the account: that a stop is missing, that you closed a position by hand, that the broker disconnected you. The ticket form is the human half of an incident, and it works best when it captures what the monitor cannot.

Route urgent tickets to Slack

Set up the ticket form in eight steps

Any form builder can do this. We use Qwenvo, a free form builder our team builds, because the pieces below are all included at no cost. If you want a fuller template to start from, see the support ticket form template.

1. Start from the IT support request template and rename it for the VPS. Delete questions a trader will not answer at 2am.
2. Add the fields frlm the table. Use a dropdown for symptom and multiple choice for "Positions open?".
3. Add conditional logic so the position fields only appear when the answer is yes. The conditional logic help article covers the setup.
4. Add hidden fields for account label, firm and VPS name, so those values arrive without anyone typing them. See hidden fields.
5. Add a file upload block for the journal and logs. Qwenvo accepts files up to 1 GB each, which is far more than a log needs.
6. Turn on partial submissions in the form Settings. A half-filled ticket from someone in a hurry still shows up as an incomplete row.
7. Open the AI triage section and add a routing rule. Every submission gets a category, a priority from low to urgent, and a summary. Route high and urgent to up to five email addresses or a Slack incoming webhook. Test with a few fake tickets before you trust the rule.
8. Add webhook to your tracker, or to Zapier, Make or n8n through a webhook trigger. Embed the form on a page you can open from your phone, or put it on a subdomain such as forms.yourbusiness.com using the custom domain setup.

The webhooks guide shows how to map the payload into other tools.

Other tools and where Qwenvo falls short

Tally's free plan caps file uploads at 10 MB per file, which is fine for a text log but toght for screenshots, and partial submissions are on its Pro plan. Google Forms needs respondents to sign in with Google to upload files, which is a bad fit for a quick report from a phone. Jotform and Typeform both work for this, but their free plans limit responses.

Qwenvo has limits too. It launched in October 2026, so there are few independent reviews yet. It is hosted in the United States, and Tally is hosted in Europe, which may matter if your compliance posture leans on EU hosting. There is no mobile app, so you use the form in a phone browser. And a form does not monitor anything. It records what you see, and your uptime monitor still has to catch the outage.

Build your ticket form free

Questions teams ask

Should I restart the VPS before opening a ticket?

Check your positions first, then capture logs and screenshots, then restart. A restart often fixes the symptom and erases the evidence, so the same fault comes back next week with nothing to diagnose. If the provider asks you to reboot, do it after the capture step.

Do my stop losses still work if the VPS is down?

Stops stored on the broker's server work without your VPS. Confirm in the terminal that yours are actually set. Any stop an EA was meant to add or trail after entry will not exist while the EA is stopped.

Does the provider need a separate ticket?

Usually yes. The provider has its own system and cares about the network and machine side. Use your own form to build the record, then paste the outage time, symptom and log excerpts into the provider's ticket.

Should one outage be one ticket or one per account?

One ticket, with every affected account listed. Per-account tickets split the timeline across several threads. The checkbox field for accounts keeps it in one place.

Next step

Build the form from the IT support template, then submit a test ticket with a fake open position and the symptom set to "RDP unreachable". Time how long it takes to reach your Slack channel or inbox. If the answer is more than a minute or two, fix the routing rule before the next real outage.