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Solarwinds support quality ??

Hi,

maybe it’s just me but after reading on the QA process i was having the same thoughts.

Especially because I am having issues to after the upgrade to 9.5
My frustrations are really starting to grow as my problems are not getting solved for more than 3 months now (and we are paying real money for support).

I reported 3 cases (on the same issue):
Closed case 97428 First reported (Created on 29-05-2009!!!)
Closed Case:10045
Escalated Case: 104794

Posted a post:

Replied on 2 different post with the same subject or similar problems:
1)
2)

I was asked to remove my wireless devices, which I did not do as we want to monitor them.
Today I installed SP4 and deleted most of my application monitor(s). The issue is still happening.

I am really getting annoyed by the issue at this time, not in the last place because I have to chase for a solution instead of SW informing me regularly on the status.

I had some experience in Support myself and in general i am very forgiving but there is a limit.

One thing in support I that I learned over the years is:
1) Users generally can understand that things take a bid longer but only as long as you keep them informed (initiative should always come from support)
2) Don't promise anything that you cannot deliver!

At this time I am on the edge of getting really @x#%&#!
Sorry to be so negative but i think i have reached my limit of being patience.

Greetings,
Mars

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FormerMember

I am sure you will not want to hear this sort of response, but i have had a great service from Solarwinds support, both early in the morning and late at night.

just the other night i had a licensing problem, and at 11pm GMT i managed to get a trial license, and get my system back up and running, and it was due to me being an idiot and making a mistake that broke it LOL!

Yes, there have been a few annoying issues with the 9.5, but SW have stated they are doing everything they can to improve the QA process...

it is just worth noting, that we are more likely to complain when things go wrong, then when things go right... i bet there was a huge number of successful 9.5 upgrades... compared to the problem upgrades

it is likely, that many of us thwackers, are pushing the product much further than the average user, and those are areas that SW QA process is always going to have problems testing....

However, I understand your pain, and I hope you get sorted soon….

Mars

I am sure you will not want to hear this sort of response, but i have had a great service from Solarwinds support, both early in the morning and late at night

I cannot judge on the way and timings they helped you, I was just describing my experience witch I am having at this time (maybe different case manager).

just the other night i had a licensing problem, and at 11pm GMT i managed to get a trial license, and get my system back up and running, and it was due to me being an idiot and making a mistake that broke it LOL!

I had similar issue's and helped pretty fast only now when the going gets tough I am not (to my satisfaction) helped, as the issue is now occurring for more than 3 months.

Yes, there have been a few annoying issues with the 9.5, but SW have stated they are doing everything they can to improve the QA process...
it is just worth noting, that we are more likely to complain when things go wrong, then when things go right... i bet there was a huge number of successful 9.5 upgrades... compared to the problem upgrades

This is not my issue (although it did trigger my problems) the issue is me having to chase them in solving or informing me on....the problem.

it is likely, that many of us thwackers, are pushing the product much further than the average user, and those are areas that SW QA process is always going to have problems testing....

This is why I am posting this so they can learn and maybe escalate internally.
In the mean time I am hoping some guru reads this, clicks on one of the links and say's to me: No biggie just press on this button and all you're problems are solved ;-)

stacy.patten

This is really starting to suck. I spend more of my time defending the software and managing it's issues than tuning it and making it everything we need it to be.

I opened a ticket 111379 on the 13th of August as Critical because I updated APM and now half of the pollers don't work. I typically get an email every other day, after my business hours (CST), requesting patience, sometimes additional information, and never have a proactive call or remote session. So, next week I have to report to our CIO about the large amount of money we spent on this product and why it's so great because it's a wonderful product, but it's a difficult sell when I can't monitor the status of 1/2 of our Global Contact Center/Call Processing environment after the last upgrade. It's also great timing because my support is due!

It totally agree that any patch or major upgrade to NPM is terrifying. I never trust that it will work well and it has taken a couple of hours each time because of how long it takes for the NetPerfMon process to stop.

It has been somewhat depressing because I've have always been a HUGE fan of Solarwinds products!

Regards,
Stacy

Miron

Hi,

Again as in a separate post it appears that the function of the product has evolved into a business application rather than just something for the techies. As such it needs to be afforded the appropriate resources both time and money in order to have development and production environment. The loss of visibility or potential of missing that a service is down needs to be quantified in order to relate the spend on the product and development enviroment to business needs.

I would assume that not many of our colleagues who deliver or maintain applications would upgrade a business system without having an easy roll back or a parallel enviroment.

While this above is all easy to say and little harder to do - it is noted that it is difficult to be champions of a product when you know that it has great potential to beat anything opensource or commercial but currently has a number of issues related to a new release. Sometimes we are aware of the potential of the product while budget holders are interested in what it can do currently - and if they keep seeing page cannot be displayed or reports not loading then it instills a negative association.

All in all I will continue to be a champion of SW and look forward to future improvements (with a bit more QA :-)

Regards

Miron

kweise

Stacy,

Just a quick comment on how long it takes the NetPerfMon process to stop when you're doing an upgrade. Save yourself the time by doing the following:

Bring up the services MMC on yoru Orion server and set the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to a start up type of disabled.

Open Task Manager.

Open the Orion Service Manager and click Shutdown everything.

Find the NetPerfMonService.exe in the processes tab of the Task Manager. Highlight it and click End Process. Click OK to the pop up warning box. That will kill the NetPerfMon process and allow you to get your upgrade done without having to wait for the service to stop on its own. Once the upgrade is completed and the configuration wizard runs and reinstalls the services, the NetPerfMon service will have it's start up type reset to Automatic. If you have multiple Orion servers, you'll need to go through these steps again to shut the services down to run the upgrade on your other servers.

Hope this saves you some time on your next upgrade.

stacy.patten

I do know of that, but I would expect the software to be able to stop what it's doing in a timely manner than for me to go through and perform these steps. I particularly would expect they could manage to do this as part of the upgrade process.

brian_duvall

Mars,

Completely agree about Solarwinds support. Typically if I need an issue resolved or worked on I need to literally harrass support to get them to work on it. If I stopped calling/emailing or following up, nothing would ever get done. I also pay for support/maintenance and get little to no feedback on open cases unless I push for it. I also am disappointed in the lack of ability to escalate cases to higher levels of support. Seems like paying users are only allowed to talk to first level support personnel which is not a good model. If an issue has been ongoing for over a few weeks and still unresolved, they should appoint a higher level support person to the case to figure out how the software bug is occuring. Overall like the product..like the price...would recommend they develop a better support group/process.

AllisonB

C'mon guys, it's not accurate to say that you only deal with first-level support at SolarWinds, and that we never escalate. We have three tiers of support that are all involved in remediating these issues, and we often also pull our developers and other subject matter experts off what they're working on to help. (And I also have to say, although we aren't currently in the business of 24/7 support, we give you really good coverage both through the support org and here on thwack.)

Brian, I looked at your case history, and many of your cases were escalated to Tier 2 or Tier 3 support. And for ticket 102994 that you have open now, we have one of our lead developers working the case.

Just wanted to clarify how things work over here. Of course, we value your feedback and we know there's always room for improvement.

Miron

Alison,

One thing I do find disappointing with support occassionally is the time it take to understand the problem and the seeming reluctance to do a 5 min webex to understand rather than sometimes days of back an forth emails.

In general all the support tickets have eventually been solved and you guys are as helpful as possible.

However one current case I have open is regarding the inability to resize labels in Network Atlas, which was previously possible. It seems that now labels and text boxes are the same. Now the problem I have is the way I have been told that because SW use a 3rd party control in Network Atlas and that the problem lies in that control - that SW are going to close the case because it is not a code problem in SW itself. Frankly I dont like this, whether you develop all the code yourself or use tons of 3rd party elements we expect that on the customer behalf these issues/faults/bugs will remain open until successfully resolved and that SW will work with any 3rd party control writer to fix the problem. I can understand if new version has to lose some functionality (due to technical reasons) and it is well communicated but considering it was only discovered after the fact I would consider these types of issues the responsibility of SW to solve and not just close.

Now you might say well resizing a label is not a big deal and yes it doesnt impact that core functionality however it can make the difference between a map looking proffessional or something created by a chicken.

Regards

Miron

davbyrd

Alison,
One thing I do find disappointing with support occassionally is the time it take to understand the problem and the seeming reluctance to do a 5 min webex to understand rather than sometimes days of back an forth emails.

Miron, et al,

From an active member of the Support Team - I do often find it easier to get on a quick GoTo to completely understand (or rectify) the issue. However time constraints are often a concern - as a "5 minute" GoTo - can turn into an hour or more.. As I'm sure you can understand, we do have to prioritize our case load - both the phone queue and the online support. Urgent cases (system down, etc) obviously have priority - and then we go from there.

We are tweaking our Escalation processes as well, as Allison mentioned - Everyone from the top down is involved.

We appreciate everyone's opinions and suggestions - I just wanted to let you know that we are continually adjusting to be the best Support Group around.

Thanks!

jedski

Stacy hi,

I have also experienced this problem where it takes hours before the Network Performance Stops and the configuration wizard error that it stopped in an untimely manner. I started to experience this starting 9.1 and still exists to 9.5. This morning, I was in session with one of the Technical Support Engineers of SOlarwinds and keeps on emphasizing that there is a problem on the server that we have. As of now, where checking on this but I think, this issue where it takes hours to stop a service and hours to connect to the poller be resolved by the next release.

You may want to see what I posted on the forum.

jedski

Allison hi,

I guess it would be better if the users know where their cases are already escalated and if possible to give updates on the current isolation being done by your team internally. I have been creating cases for almost 2 years now and still I, like everyone here would like to have some cases escalated most specially those cases where a bug or error is seen. In my experience, everytime I encounter an error, the technical support always says you need to upgrade to this version with sp x to verify if the error still occurs. Actually there is no definite answer. I do understand that some errors are not yet seen on the solarwinds but recommending a product upgrade everytime I encounter an issue is not always a solution or workaround. Another thing is that, everytime an error is seen by the engineer from SW, initially they would always suspect the server even if you have an idea that it is not really a server problem. Then again they would insist that you should have raid 1+0. etc. I would always end up solving things on my own.

To be fair, there are some cases where Support Engineers are capable of answering my questions with regards to my problems and there also times where when I am wrong with my assumptions on the problems encountered. No one is perfect but yes there is always room for improvement and both of us from Support Engineers are learning from the problems we encounter everyday.

As for me, I still have cases which are unresolved for almost months now, I think maybe a year since I first created the case. Tellabs issue to be exact. It all started from unknown interfaces down to the very last which is unable to monitor its sub-interfaces.

our company is selling services for solarwinds including installations and support. and i myself is a solarwinds support of our company, and it is really hard for me to defend that the product is good when there are problems that not yet resolved. But another thing that is hard is that, being a support where I would anwer all of the problems encountered by our team with regards to solarwinds. If in case i can't anymore answer their question I create a case to solarwinds technical support. And I guess this is the escalation process that we need. That if in case the engineer assigned to my case is not anymore capable of answering, it is ok to escalate it to a higher one. However, SW Support may say that this is already escalated but, users dont have any basis. I guess informing the users that their issues are already escalated is a good thing.

I have always enjoyed solarwinds since I started it. It is really good. Have tried to take the certification but failed but still I'd like to try it one more time. I feel like its a challenge. But I hope we would still be encouraged to take this because we have to. I have nothing against Solarwinds Support but I only wish for its improvement.

Thanks,

Mars

I guess it would be better if the users know where their cases are already escalated and if possible to give updates on the current isolation being done by your team internally.

That if in case the engineer assigned to my case is not anymore capable of answering, it is ok to escalate it to a higher one. However, SW Support may say that this is already escalated but, users dont have any basis. I guess informing the users that their issues are already escalated is a good thing.

I have nothing against Solarwinds Support but I only wish for its improvement.

Jedski you hit the nail on the head.

It's all about communication and managing expectations.

jedski

"it is just worth noting, that we are more likely to complain when things go wrong, than when things go right..."

- I guess your right here....Thanks! I love this quote...lolz

AllisonB

Good feedback. Just want to point out that we're currently working to make support more transparent, as some of you mentioned. For example, we've added the ability to check the latest status of your support tickets in your customer portal.

Support Ticket Status Now Visible in Your Customer Portal

This is just phase one, and we have plans to continue to expand that functionality.