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Is it Me or Has Solarwinds Tech Support Taken a Nose Dive Lately?

I've had six cases opened in the last six weeks with problems I'm having with NPM 12.1, NTA 4.24 and an EVAL of VQNM 4.4. On all but one of these, the tech support has been horrendous. I'm talking 15 hour response time for a system down emergency, waiting on hold for 45 minutes and then being forced to leave a voice mail that never gets returned - for an Urgent issue (had to restore DB and revert snap shots of Orion VMs twice!). I've talked to supervisor on top of supervisor and then tech support managers, director of support and still get nowhere. If you actually read this Tech Support, check out case numbers 1135026, 114288 and more recently, 1154772 and 1153163. We have 39 active licenses for Solarwinds products and are seriously considering dumping them all - some will actually be dumped in the next few weeks. I mean why pay for support if the only response from Solarwinds is to be ignored?

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mbird

Hilariously I'm experiencing the exact opposite recently. I opened a low-level ticket for some assistance and the representative got back to me very quickly on the initial contact, a follow-up, and answering some questions I had. I definitely had problems with support in the past, but my last experience was actually pretty good.

Sorry to hear you had problems like that though, it sounds like you definitely could have used a hand in that scenario.

ctlswadmin

I recently had an issue with support, besides that everything prior to (over the last 5 years) everything has been alright. If you want I can recommend good people at Solarwinds that can help you.

bobmarley

I just worked with Brian in support yesterday on a pretty tough problem and he had it fixed within 40 minutes. I also requested a specific time/day for a 'medium' priority issue and was able to get a specific time scheduled to work on it which was fantastic.

nnettrouer

Spinner, I had an issue when i upgraded to 12.1 and specifically when i tried to upgrade NCM. Because i opened my ticket at like 10 or 11 pm, the Philippines took the ticket. That made it take a long time since they work at my night and such. Once i switched it over to the US, it was handled VERY quickly. It might be due to the time of day you initiated your ticket. You can specify work times in your tickets, and perhaps that might help. I have been very happy with there support over the past couple of years.

tcount

Ever since SolarWinds was acquired, it seems that support has gotten slower to respond, and when they do, they don't have the answers or knowledge. Possibly the result of saving costs?

mcbridea

I have been away from SolarWinds products for about 2 years but we just bought NPM so I'm back. I have had 4 issues that required support calls so far. One of the issues was handled very quickly by an Austin support associate. Twice I waited on hold until I had to hang up and abandon the call. I'm on hold now for the forth issue. From my POV so far it seems support is very thin now.

rschroeder

I, too, have had some varying response times over the last fourteen years. Typically my experience has been that telephone calls are handled much more quickly than cases submitted online.

For a long time I've submitted questions / problems to Thwack first, and only opened support tickets via telephone after a day or so, when I get the impression Thwack people don't have what I need when I would like it.

Usually I get a good set of hits more quickly from Thwack, and may not even end up opening a support ticket because someone had the exact answer I needed, or had experiences similar to mine and they provided resources necessary to resolving the issue on my own.

I understand--you're paying for support, you should get a prompt response. But it doesn't hurt a lot to pose your questions to Thwack while you're on hold . . . Maybe we can help.

superfly

I recently upgraded my server from NPM 11.0.1 to 12.1 and had issues along the way. Each ticket I logged was responded to within 30 minutes.

Then a few weeks ago I wanted to upgrade the server from Windows 2008 to 2012 but each time I tried, Solarwinds failed to start after booting up on 2012. Whilst it took them a while to figure out the problem, the response time to me logging a job was still within the 30 mins.

I couldn't fault their service during these issues. I never ring as I'm in Australia and there's no local support number AFAIK.

TheG0at

I waited 45 min yesterday to have a tech go off on a tangent that had nothing to do with what I asked. He then wouldn't open a ticket because he felt my request should have been a feature request.

After opening my own ticket online, one of the tech support managers named Erickson responded with basically the same thing. He gave me a suggestion that was exactly what I told them I had already done.

I then spent another 45 min this morning complaining to customer service and tech support trying to get an AE on the phone. When one finally arrived low and behold he gave me 4-5 suggestions that were exactly what I was looking for.

This is by far one of the worst tech support experiences I have had with SW. My last three tickets have all had a steady decline in support. The fact is the L1 staff searches the KB and if it isn't already documented they don't know the product well enough to help out. It's a little frustrating when you just want to bounce things an experienced engineer.

rschroeder

I had a great experience just today with SW support. Erik called me from Manila , and we did a great WebEx session troubleshooting NCM service account credentials and NCM archive directories. In twenty minutes he'd understood my concerns, seen me demonstrate the problem, reproduced it on his own, and made some recommendations.

One recommendation was to upgrade to the next version, and I passed on it. It seemed the problem would remain, and further testing revealed an upgrade wouldn't have caught this particular problem, which was a rights issue.

Once the rights issue was discovered and addressed, next was proving the service account was working, using the right credentials. It wasn't. I fixed that and moved on to the next issue, which was archive paths.

NCM was saying it couldn't validate the paths, and that particular message wasn't deep enough to provide the right information to fix it at once. It seemed NCM couldn't find the path at all, or that the service account didn't have rights to the path & share. Testing that revealed the account had the wrong password and was locking out. Again, an easy fix, but not intuitive (except through hindsight).

Erik's communication skills were impressive. I asked if he'd lived or been educated in the states, and he replied that he'd been in the Philippines all his life. When I queried how he'd learned the pronunciation and accents and vernacular so well, he responded "I watch a lot of U.S. television in my spare time."

Ha!

cjfranca

"submitted questions / problems to Thwack first, and only opened support

tickets via telephone after a day or so, when I get the impression Thwack

people don't have what I need when I would like it." I use this the best

practice.

Sem mais.Claudia França

2017-09-07 19:00 GMT-03:00 rschroeder :

<thwack.solarwinds.com>
Is it Me or Has Solarwinds Tech Support Taken a Nose Dive Lately?
reply from rschroeder
<thwack.solarwinds.com/.../rschroeder
in Network Performance Monitor - View the full discussion
<thwack.solarwinds.com/.../374243

diggy123

I'm at my breaking point with Solarwinds.

superfly

What's the problem?