Logging Support Calls with Vendors/Manufacturers

[blueboy2001]

We have support agreements in place with vendors of our major infrastructure kit.

However, some of my colleagues are extremely reluctant to log support tickets with them, even in the event of a fairly significant problem. I'm not talking about opening a ticket every time you see an error message, but things that are actually not working as they should do and affecting users.

For example, a couple of weeks ago our storage appliance was performing slowly with very high CPU usage after we used the storage manufacturer tool to do a single file restore on a VM. This lead to over 24 hours of "investigation" by 2 colleagues using forums etc and despite me suggesting several times to get a call with the storage manufacturer they wouldn't do so. Excuses included "They'll say it's a VMWare problem", "They'll just ask for loads of reports and logs and won't be much help", and "It's probably a bug, they'll say we need to do a software upgrade".

I really don't get it. We've paid for support, but they see it as some sort of failure on their part to seek assistance from the supplier. I'm not suggesting dump it on the supplier and forget about it, but I don't see any harm in getting a call open and see what happens. If you fix it in the meantime, just close the call.

Is this just a problem in my organisation, or is this attitude common amongst techies?

 

[blueboy2001]

I work more the apps side of things rather than infrastructure, and there are certain software suppliers we use who I will avoid logging a call with because they'll say "We don't support this configuration running on Windows 7 on a Thursday after 3pm, are you happy for us to close the call?" There is one particular support operative for a niche piece of software we use who I told my boss I'd rather resign than have to speak to him ever again! I suspect he may be blind because he always comes straight out with " I've never seen this issue before"

However if the system was down or unusable or I would normally get straight on to the supplier after checking the basics like the appropriate services were running and network was operating normally.

I had a strange exchange with Oracle a few weeks ago when I logged a call asking for advice on how to resize a virtual disk in one of their VM products. They didn't seem to be able to deal with an advice call and kept asking what the problem was. I wanted to know how to do something and all they could come up with was sending me the instructions for the wrong version of Solaris, then said it couldn't be done. I suggested another way of achieving what I wanted to do, and they came back and said "That should be fine". I know it "should" be fine, I wanted some assurance that it "would" be fine!