Support, Yourself

Good support is really important. I'm a member of a sysadmins' team and I know support can really suck.
The company that supports one of the products of a fellow sysadmin uses him for support. I mean seriously, how lame can support be if they send people down to us to understand how the system they support works?
Another company (and I'm talking about a major company here) seems to ignore a serious performance issue, the problem is present on their site too but they don't seem to be doing much towards supplying a solution.

Given those, I'm used to get lots of "You got a reply to your SR within 15 mins?! I wish I had at least someone to talk to about my issue...". And indeed, the Metalink and the support system of Oracle are most impressive at times.

But people are not really satisfied with what they have, are they? I'm no different.
I have the following rule of thumb:
When I open a new SR the outcome will be one of two:

1. It's a well known issue that I somehow managed to miss searching the Metalink, there's an easy solution, we all live happily ever after.

2. It's not a well known issue.
I will be asked to perform tests that are often irrelevant, this I can live with, after all who am I to really know the insides and decide what's relevant?
But the thing that really drives me mad is when I get something like the following
"Well, the issue is not reproducible on our test environment but I see you don't have any 11.5.9 CU installed and you're only on ATG_PF.H (no RUPs) so I'm gonna ask you to install to 11.5.9 CU2 and ATG_PF.H RUP6 to match our configuration. Oh, and in two days I will write that I haven't heard back from you and so I'll inactivate this SR in one day stating I believe the issue has been resolved by the trivial solution I provided. No, I don't really think your problem will be solved but you can't prove me wrong until you try and then you'll have your hands full dealing with the mess the recently released RUP6 has caused." Does the guy really know what he's talking about? Does he really think I'll perform a semi version upgrade to maybe solve a small issue?
So, in most cases, I might get some hints from support but I will eventually have to work out the solution on my own (or with help, but not from Oracle). I might even find a piece of bugged Oracle code (I'm on Windows so wrong direction slashes might cause problems, etc.) but then I'll get something like "You're right, our bad, here's an idea for a piece of code you can write to workaround the problem".

Another annoying thing is that in both cases I'll probably be asked some questions I've already answered. What's the point of asking me all those question when I open an SR if I'm going to be asked for my R12 Rapidwiz version again by the support technician? OK, I got another technician to handle my case, can't he read the SR and see what tests I've already performed?


Actually, this post isn't meant to be (maybe just a bit) about blowing out steam about how bad is Oracle's support, it's probably relatively good.
My point is that when it comes to the real stuff it's the sysadmin's job to solve the problem, he knows his system best and that's what he's paid for. Have all the support you want but some issues will only be solved after spending many days hacking the system and getting frustrated for not achieving anything and wasting your time on annoying problems. And all by yourself.


Finally, for all the support guys who come to read this post. Nothing personal, really. I'm sure you have complaints about us customers as well, so just take it easy :-).