Terrible support, terrible product.

First, unless you do something like swear or make an inappropriate joke or comment, we never delete or censor posts.  It completely devalues the community.  If you look up here at older posts, there are others in which folks are venting anger or frustration.

Second, I am sorry to hear you have been having so many issues.  I will ensure this get visibility to the appropriate folks here at SolarWinds.  I did take a peek at your previous tickets, but since I was not involved in them I do not want to speculate as to the issues.  I can assure you this is not a common theme across our customers as we have many running Orion successfully.  However, the fact remains the product experience has been unacceptable to you at this point in time.

I am going to reach out to you offline via email to see if we can dig into this further and see what the heck is going on.   

Spudnet,

I am not a SolarWinds employee.  I am a SolarWinds user and our company is a Partner with SolarWinds for Training, Sales, Consulting, and Services.

I would very much like to see if there is anything that our organization can do to assist you with the challenges you've faced.

My direct cell phone number is:  918-724-5622.  I carry it with me 24x7x365.  If I don't answer, it is because I'm otherwise engaged, but leave a message and I'll get back with you in a timely manner.

Sincerely,

Jay R. Cummings

Wow,

Sorry to hear you have had such bad support. Even way up here in Canada I have received amazing remote support and usually get a tech to remote into my desktop the next day to help.

The only gripe i have is I have to put in a ticket everytime I forget to release my license for my engineering toolset if my laptop dies. Please Solarwinds, give us the ability to release these from our account page!

It is obvious that they have out-sourced a lot of their support and getting responses at 8 - 9 CST is truly annoying. We pay plenty for these licenses and should have on hours support.

PS I did have someone respond to my tickets this morning so its not all bad.

It is obvious that they have out-sourced a lot of their support and getting responses at 8 - 9 CST is truly annoying. We pay plenty for these licenses and should have on hours support.

PS I did have someone respond to my tickets this morning so its not all bad.

Spudnet,

   I can understand your frustration. I have had some slow responses, but I have always had our situations resolved. I find it best, if it is a serious situation needing immediate attention, to open a ticket and when you get a response from the support technician ask them to call you. We just recently moved our Orion server over to VM and everything went a haywire. After about two hours of sending e-mails back and forth I was a little frustrated, but once we were on the phone everything went a lot smoother. We initiated a gotomeeting and now things are up and running again.

   I have also found a lot of help on the forums. The entire community here is happy to help in anyway.

I am also a SW customer and I have very few issues with my SW applications.  They can take a bit of time to get everything the way you want, but I think it is worth it to be able to keep that good of an eye on hundreds of systems (some people even have thousands).

My biggest issue was an OS problem.  When running sfc, and there were a ton of files that were off, so I built a new OS, installed the application and restored the DB and everything was working great!

I'm just an average solar winds customer and don't have any other ties into Solar Winds.  We have been using the product for serveral years starting with the toolset and have added more products over the years.  We have have been happy witht he products.  We have run into problems with components and features and a few things we wished the product could do but the support team has always been prompt, professional and done a good job resolving the issues.  We had a few that stretched out related to a bug but they maintained contact and let us know when the bug was addressed.  I have been very pleased with the support team.   The development team also seems to take these forums seriously and have added enhancements that would benefit the larger user base.   My experience with Solar Winds has been very good.  They have always been a very customer focused company and listened to what the users have to say, good or bad.   Sorry to hear you are having trouble. 

 This forum has also been a great resource in the past and I have gotten lots of help from it.  I don't know what kind of trouble you are having but I would be happy to help or share information about our setup.

Thanks

Spudnet

We (like many of the other folks that have responded) are also a SolarWinds customer and have just recently become an authorized partner.

When we first started working with the product about 2 years ago I also had problems with the knowledge level and responsiveness of the SolarWinds support team.  Since then I have seen significant improvements in their support in both responsiveness and knowledge level.  After working with the product for some time I have learned the quick-fix things that I can do to resolve problems and I have also learned to quickly gauge if my issue is something that first level support will be able to handle or if I will need 2nd or 3rd tier support and I always ask to have my issue escalated if I feel necessary which they will do without question even to the point of working with a Software Developer if necessary.  I have also learned (as mentioned by another poster here) to ask for a phone call and GoToMeeting which they are always willing to do and will almost always get your issue resolved more quickly.

With regard to "Squirrely Software" I have also experienced similar issues.  I have experienced problems with just about every NPM upgrade that I have done and that's even after waiting for a week or so to make sure there are not any big issues that people note after upgrading.  Fortunately, getting the fallout of these upgrades resolved has almost always been a relatively quick process with the SolarWinds support folks.

Ultimately, I find our SolarWinds solution to be a good value in contrast to other solutions we have worked with.  No product is perfect, you have to find the one that works best for you in all aspects; functionality, stability, support, etc.  Hopefully the SolarWinds people (I see Brandon is going to contact you and he is awesome) will be able to help you out and change your opinion of both the product and the people that support it.  In the unfortunate event that you choose not to continue to use SolarWinds I do hope that you are able to find a product that fits your needs.

Our initial reactons to NPMv10.0 were much like yours when we began using it this past November.  We found the system crashed on us a number of times for no apparent reason.  We also had concerns about the quality of SW support.

We were fortunate enough to be looking at the server's  performance when it started going awry.  We discovered the cause of our issue was a memory leak in the Orion Service Manager.  We connect to the server via RDP and we would leave the service manager running continually.  We have not encountered a system crash since we began closing it after use.  We couldn't find any documentation about this so we had some frustrating time before discovering it.

We have also learned how to use tech support more efficiently.  Although we still experience some difficulties getting good responses, we have learned that some of the techs are better than others.  When we have a particularly vexing issue, we ask to escalate to one of the more knowledgeable techs.