What Clients See
One of the chief things my clients complain about when opening support cases with Microsoft is that the people working support tickets on the Microsoft side… Aren’t actually Microsoft employees.
They’re third party vendors.
When they end up working with a third party vendor, the lack of expertise and poor communication is obvious and painful.
Many support cases are handled by third party vendors, and my clients often complain that their staff has totally inadequate SQL Server knowledge to do the job.
Even when my clients do get someone from Microsoft, the person they get is juggling an enormous caseload. The truly knowledgeable folks are worked to the bone and scattered across hundreds of cases.
The amount of turnover in support roles at Microsoft is also pretty astounding. I used to know a lot of people who worked in them, and… they’ve all moved on to other roles.
At this point, you’re lucky to get someone with 18 months of SQL Server experience handling your support case. That’s a far cry from when 18 months was about the minimum experience you’d find.
The worst part? I have clients who have paid Microsoft upwards of $75k USD for support contracts, and they can’t get anyone to answer basic questions or help with basic troubleshooting.
You Deserve Better
But you won’t get it any time soon from Microsoft.
They’ve cratered their once excellent support infrastructure and replaced it with a frustrating, pass-the-buck, often indifferent group of third-party vendors, and overworked internal staff.
The decline in Microsoft SQL Server support quality can have serious consequences for your business. Inefficient support can lead to extended downtime, data loss, and decreased productivity.
Your business deserves better, and that’s where I come in.
With years of experience in SQL Server management and support, I understand the complexities and the importance of prompt, effective support.
Here’s what I offer:
- Expert Knowledge: As a recognized SQL Server expert, I have a deep understanding of SQL Server and can provide the expert support that outsourced teams often lack.
- Clear Communication: I prioritize clear, effective communication to ensure that I fully understand your issues and provide the best possible solutions.
- Tailored Solutions: I take the time to understand your specific environment and needs, providing solutions that are tailored to your business.
- Consistent Support: You’ll receive consistent, high-quality support that you can rely on to keep your systems running smoothly.
- Help Dealing with Microsoft Support: You need someone on your side who can work through support cases, provide necessary technical details, and call support staff on their BS when they give you lousy reports.
Don’t let declining support quality affect your business. Hire me to handle your support tickets and ensure that your SQL Server environment receives the expert care it deserves.
With my help, you can focus on what you do best — running your business — while I take care of the rest.
Reach out today to discuss how I can support your SQL Server needs and provide the expertise and reliability that your business deserves.
Together, we can ensure that your technology works for you, not against you.
Thanks for reading!
Going Further
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
The last experience I had with support was for an SSRS transfer of the application to a new machine. The documentation was demonstrably wrong and the person who helped me (from Texas and literally a few miles from your class in Irving) whizzed me right through it. That’s been the exception.
I haven’t had any reason to call support since but I note that this is not limited to MicroSoft. IBM has been singularly horrid for years, SAP is about to slip into the abyss based on my last experiences and Google Cloud is cryptic at best.
What I do is generally look around and research before I assign anything to support if possible and provide details and evidence. The problem is that management wants contact with support as a CYA position. The other issue is that support will not look at the detailed information I send across and the last time actually suggested what I’d already proven to fail. So it pretty much becomes a waste of time.
The “follow the sun” process, when used, is generally not working, be it support or internally with my clients and customers. I start to understand why interns in the medical field are expeected to work very long hours in monitoring a patient.
The solution is to move on but generally vendors have you by the short and curlies.
The biggest problems my clients find with support are what you mentioned: no one reads the details, and they suggest things that either don’t work, or won’t work.
For example, one client asked if there were any cost savings they could realize based on environment utilizations, and support suggested turning off their 24×7 e-commerce servers at night.
Like, how do you even get the nerve to type that out to someone?
That’s amazing. I got a vendor support person who admits to knowing nothing about databases suggest running index rebuilds because it worked in a similar situation with another customer. No evidence, no explanation and obviously no justification. Management asked for it to be done anyway otherwise the vendor threatened to not support it. They didn’t ask for evidence it worked and ultimately it didn’t. But they are still rebuilding indexes on even the smallest tables based on fragmentation percentage. Yes, it’s stupid but I don’t have to deal with it.
Well, yes, this is what happens when you put people with zero technical knowledge in support. They cargo cult around “one weird trick” and that’s the end of it.
Part of the problem is that MS choose your 3rd party vendor rather than you do, if you could direct your money to a particular 3rd party they would be motivated to improve & win and retain customers. Support is kind of hard without access to the knowledge base and a huge pool of customers, the workflow is very lumpy.
Do you really think third party support for a product like SQL Server is a good idea?
Plus they pass problem to the next person who asks again for the same sql logs, trace files, diagnostic logs, etc. Same questions on environment supplied to in the ticket and to the 1st level person. Obviously no communication. I only open a ticket when I have to; basically, told to by my management. All a big CYA.
Oh boy, yeah, I see that a lot too. Every month someone new asks for a repo that’s been provided to six other people over the last six months. It’s such a circus.
Sure. If I could use my MS support agreement and direct MS to the third party vendor of my choice, I would direct MS to you or Brent Ozar.
It’s not really a circus if all you have is the clowns.
My most recent experience with Microsoft was with a corrupted SQL Server database. Microsoft kept blaming the storage vendor, even though we went through all the vendor’s storage array logs with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing. (I’m still convinced the problem is in the VSS Shadow Copy service.) And that was after they insisted we spend nearly 24 hours running checkdisk (multiple times) on a 6 TB server. Went through multiple techs and they were all equally useless. We gave up on Microsoft and ended up trying to piece together the data in the affected tables by manually copying out the rows one by one to work around the corrupted ones. Considering the affected tables had hundreds of millions of rows each, you can imagine how much fun that was – all while management is breathing down our necks.
Oh that’s so painful to hear about. Finger pointing like that is a common theme in many of the support cases clients complain about. Sorry you had to deal with that.