New Connector Turn Around Time

byrona

I am curious, as a LEM customer if we need connectors built and we pass the required information along via a support ticket, what is the typical turn around time to have the LEM team publish a connector?

I ask because during the sales process we were told by the SE that having new connectors built was no big deal, all we needed to do was open a ticket and we could get connectors build as part of standard maintenance, especially if it was for an industry standard application; however, back in April I asked for a connector for FileZilla FTP Server (via ticket 463526) and I still have not seen a connector published for this.

I should note that I am not angry, I just want to have my expectations reset appropriately for this type of thing before we make more significant investments in the product for our PCI service offerings.

FormerMember

Honestly: it varies. Certainly weeks, sometimes months, rarely never. I'm not sure where the actual middle of the bell curve is.

What happens:

1. You say "hey, we're interested in covering product X." The support team likely asks form questions: "what does product X do and how does it log? can you send samples?" All that gets handed over as a feature request to our product team.
2. The product team takes a look and says "hey, that's enough information" or "no, we need more information, this isn't doable from what you provided. Help?"
3. If we have enough info, it gets passed on for prioritization.
4. At this point, a level 5 bureaucrat (me) along with other team members take a look at a few factors and we prioritize where it goes on our list:
   • Age of request (usually newer requests get placed "somewhere in the middle" or lower, because we have requests that have been around longer)
   • Frequency of request (if something has been requested multiple times, it gets bumped up the list to address multiple cases)
   • Likelihood of reuse of the request (is this a common utility? a one-off? something other customers of LEM will likely or maybe using?)
   • Criticality to the customer (is LEM unusable without this data? is it something we covered a previous version of that the new version isn't working? is it preventing a major use case? or is it extending an existing deployment?)
5. Then, based on availability of dev team, they work down the list.

Unfortunately this process gets interrupted when additional development resources are needed (something complex or new), not enough information is provided and we have to do more digging, or we receive a lot of requests that need the same type of development (lots of things in the Event Log, lots of things in syslog, etc).

It can't hurt to ping on your request, here or via support case, to let us know that the criticality has changed, or you're really interested in the data, or you feel like it's blocking something. We always have a queue of requests and it's hard prioritizing everything.