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Where is support when you need it???

scottd

The support folks at SW suggest that you do your upgrades during planned outages and most large companies do it that way(we do). Our planned outages are not during normal business hours as would be the same for most large companies. So what do you do when you have issues with the product during a planned outage? Does SolarWinds not provide support after hours??? It doesnt look like it... How good is that? You can call their toll free number and leave a message, but they would really like you to submit a ticket. I have done both quite some time ago and have only received an automated email. That is not very good support. Perhaps they should call it "Part-time Support", "Support when ever we feel like it" or maybe "Support Sometimes" or maybe even "9to5 Support"... I dont feel real supported by my vendor right now. Is it just me, or does everyone get this same level of service?

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aLTeReGo

Support hours are publicly posted here. http://www.solarwinds.com/support/

Access to our Technical Support Team during the hours of 7 a.m. - 6 p.m. CST, 7 a.m. - 7 p.m. GMT Monday-Friday.

They make no claims of 24x7x365. Although I agree that most service impacting work is and should be done off hours whenever possible, I personally don't consider network management service impacting, but that may be different depending on what services you provide.

scottd

Thanks for the info.

Our organization has become quite dependant on this application as we provide services to various levels of our business and although network management itself may not be service impacting, not having it could be. I guess it depends on how you utilize the tools. The issue seems to be with their license key generation tool(website and local app) not working like it should. I am prepared to back out of the botched install and put it back to where it was before i started. They should offer some level of support for after hours. After all, they are dealing with IT organizations that run 24/7.

jbaulsir

We too are dependant on the Orion Package to monitor our production systems, but we take a different tacked on upgrading it. We upgrade Orion in the middle of the day, there are two reasons, first, we are not staffed 24/7 and depend on Orion for off hours monitoring and alerting, all primary IT support staff are on-line during the day, most of them using the systems we monitor and have high probility of detecting problems during the Orion upgrade, and second, so we have availability to Solarwinds support if we need it.

We have rarely needed support as most all of our upgrades have gone smoothly from simple service packs to moving the poller, website and database on to a new server.

mstevens

Solarwinds has always provided excellent service to me and If your in a position where Solarwinds as a network management system has become so critical as to provide 24x7 support, then I would recommend you utilize more best practices in regards to patch management and outage mitigation such as.

1. If your patching a server with an updated release, you need to be prepared to roll the system back if a problem occurs immediately. This should involve using tools such as Ghost, which has been around since the 90s!! or utilziing SAN partition mirroring or SAN Replication.

2. Configure a staging or test environment that allows the patching to occur in parallel and having the test person or team validating the install.

Whenever we patch any system, whether Linux, Windows, AS400, we typically want to demonstrate a recovery period within the maintenance window as well (internally we aim for 1 hour recover). If you work for a large organization Im sure you have been dealing w/ the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley and having to follow the change control recommendations for system modifications.

We are a 24x7 shop as well but I would never depend on the vendor to provide my uptime in regards to patching or upgrades. It is very costly to provide 24x7 support in that most companies are 1st level help desk support who take tickets and escalate them to the different levels (which typically means the 'expert' gets woken up at 3am). The cost/benefit of providing a 3rd level help desk I have never seen any company justify unless you were supporting an ERP system or OS environment. You can always go to other software products like Cisco or HP and spend the $100,000 to get your 24x7 support help desk.

JB has a good point too in that you KNOW when they have support available so you need to manage your planned outages if the service is underneath you. Our ERP systems have planned outages on weeknds but I coordinate my outages during times I know the support staff are going to be available and if it is a critical app for your Enterprise, you should have a support technician on the PHONE w/ you during the upgrade. We do this when working on some critical SAN or Cisco blade upgrades because stuff does always creep up that needs that extra tweaking. THis way you arent providing "only outage upgrades" or " i can only change my systems when they do" or "part-time IT guy". (relax, this part is jking)

I would be glad to give you some good quick server recovery procedures using tools such as Ghost since this discussion board is a good information sharing space that beats any other vendors discussion board out there. Any problem Ive ever posted here has been resolved and alot of times youll find the support on the discussion groups will provide most of the answers you need.

Alot of us have blackberries too so if your stuck at night with a problem I would recommend posting here and perhaps we in the user community may have the answer as well and would be glad to help.

thanks!
Mark

scottd

Settle down now. If you read my post i said i was fully prepared to back out of the botched install, which i did without issue.

mark_wiggans

scottd-

Unfortunately it seems you needed contact during the "7" of our now 24 x 6 support. Please take note of the contact number from here in case this situation arises again. Also, please note that the support ticketing system is third party software (Netsuite) and sometimes replies get trapped in spam filters so check there as well.

HTH

mstevens

Excellent, Glad to hear. I can understand how it can be frustrating sometimes and thats why we've concentrated alot on server recovery.

scottd

Thanks for the info. I am now aware of the support window and will try to leverage it in the future. I made an assumption that since i have dealt with some support folks in Europe before that the supoort window would have been a little wider than it is. I admit i was a bit steamed when i made the post and by no way would this issue bring our company to its knees. I had many issues just getting to the point of a simple license issue, the main one being our security dept. they have our orion box locked down so tight its not even funny. My apologies to any who may have been offended.

I still wouldnt trade the product for another one...