Forum Discussion
JRahm
Jan 10, 2007Admin
I understand the frustration with support. It is difficult sometimes. My recommendations for you to get immediate support.
1) Learn the product. Know what it can and can't do. The documentation is good enough to point you beyond the simpleton configurations and into some of the more complicated scenarios. If you have lab gear, I'd recommend spending as much time as possible working through various what-if scenarios. Knowing the product will help to:
2) Provide thorough explanations of the problem. Also provide detailed topological drawings, sniffer captures, qkview reports, gui Captures UP FRONT in the case. The more immediate all the information is provided, the more immediate your case can get focused attention.
3) Use the websupport site to open cases, and assign your cases appropriately. Don't cry wolf, if it is a general question, don't assign it as a site at risk. Not only are you being kind to your fellow F5 customers, you are also not wasting the time of the senior techs reviewing level 1 cases.
4) Copy your Account rep and Sales Engineer on the inital case response and at any time you feel the case is being mishandled. Contact support early in the work day for each support center and ask for escalation/reassignment if necessary.
5) Take a trip to Seattle and meet the support staff if you get the chance. They are nice people who are overwhelmed with a relatively new and very advanced product line. Face time with your vendors is a great chance to air your concerns and for you to get some perspective on the issues they face in growing the support of their products.
6) For iRules specifically, I can't tell you how valuable the devcentral team has been to my development. Are they available at my beck-and-call? Of course not, they respond when they can. After all, this is done on their personal time (most of them anyway). The forums are filled with so many examples of how to solve problems that a good search and reading session will yield far greater results than posting a question that has been asked fifty times, in which someone on the forum has to do the searching or regurgitation for the individual asking, taking time that might otherwise have been better spent contemplating a new issue that someone is having. F5 offers professional support to those you do not want to spend the time/resources/effort to learn the product.