Re: Best TAC Services from Equipment Vendors

[joel () joelesler net]

You sir, not wrong.

> On Mar 11, 2024, at 10:04, michael brooks - ESC <michael.brooks () adams12 org> wrote:
>
>
> > It may be a pain in the butt to get Cisco equipment, but their TAC is sublime.  If something is critical enough, and 
> > you push hard enough, Cisco will move heaven and earth to solve your issue.
>
> But is this not the problem itself?
>
> Strap in for an "I remember when" ...
> Once upon a time, I could call (specifically) Cisco TAC, knowing, without any doubt, that my quality problem 
> resolution was inbound, no questions asked. That came to a crashing halt about 15 years ago when a TAC engineer 
> wanted to bounce our Voice VLAN SVI in the middle of an airport production day. I about turned over my desk trying to 
> wrest the remote control session back from him before he hit enter on the shut. Since then, I have had to go through 
> a not insignificant evaluation period of TAC engineers before I let them take control of a remote session, and it is 
> now simply pure instinct to log SSH sessions.
>
> Fast forward and my user base is now ~45k people, not massive by any stretch, but certainly not a small org, and we 
> tend to buy Premium/Platinum support on all of our critical applications. I truly do have to "push hard" and long to 
> get the attention of our support teams to get a seemingly simple problem supported and solved. Our support is still 
> in the dumper. Take, for instance, a recent case with our replication/DR vendor. Our DR environment has been offline 
> for ~3 months, does that not scream "critical?" And yet, we are still having engineers jump on a call to collect .... 
> the same data that the last engineer jumped on a call to collect. One of our engineers, as has been not-so-subtly 
> alluded to, resorted to a screamfest to get the attention of TAC, and not surprisingly that dressing-down got upper 
> levels involved.
>
> For good measure, major networking vendor possibly mentioned earlier spent 9 months, at the developer level, 
> troubleshooting a multicast issue which ultimately turned out to be PIM not configured on all interfaces in the path. 
> Yes, I felt like an idiot for not already checking that, but should not have the first engineer on the phone asked 
> this?
>
> Admittedly, we are going through a rough patch in terms of support, but it is not out of line with the past decade's 
> experiences.
>
>
> michael brooks
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 12:47 PM Joel Esler <joel () joelesler net <mailto:joel () joelesler net>> wrote:
> > It may be a pain in the butt to get Cisco equipment, but their TAC is sublime.  If something is critical enough, and 
> > you push hard enough, Cisco will move heaven and earth to solve your issue.  
> > — 
> > Sent from my iPhone
> >
> > > On Mar 6, 2024, at 13:42, Pascal Masha <pascalmasha () gmail com <mailto:pascalmasha () gmail com>> wrote:
> > >
> > > 
> > > For us this has been the experience to a point where 100s of nodes( from vendor x) had to be swapped out because no 
> > > one had the patience anymore…
> > >
> > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 21:29, <sronan () ronan-online com <mailto:sronan () ronan-online com>> wrote:
> > > > Interesting, this has never been my experience even with Cisco or Juniper, have always been able to escalate 
> > > > quickly to engineering. I wonder if it was related to the size of my accounts.
> > > >
> > > > Shane
> > > >
> > > > > On Mar 6, 2024, at 1:27 PM, Pascal Masha <pascalmasha () gmail com <mailto:pascalmasha () gmail com>> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > Thought about it but so far I believe companies from China provide better and fast TAC responses to their 
> > > > > customers than the likes of Cisco and perhaps that’s why some companies(where there are no restrictions)prefer 
> > > > > them for critical services. 
> > > > >
> > > > > For a short period in TAC call you can have over 10 R&D engineers and solutions provided in a matter of hours 
> > > > > even if it involves software changes.. while these other companies even before you get in a call with a TAC 
> > > > > engineer it’s hours and when they join you hear something like “my shift ended 15 minutes ago, hold let me look 
> > > > > for another engineer”. WHY? Thoughts
>
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