Quality of Veeam support is lacking these days

[rvannorman]

I agree with the previous comments above. In the old days a tech would call you back, create a screen share and the issue would be resolved in real time. It was a very positive experience as we knew our issue would be resolved the first time / first call. Now the emails back and forth are annoying as any clarification needs several back and forth emails before your issue can even begin to be worked on.

[AlexHeylin]

I also would like to send kudos to Veeam regarding this post. This is something you don't see every day. Only a few companies will leave a topic like this open and public and also freely let customers discuss this subject.

+1. I know at least one company where any customer or partner saying that anything is less than completely amazing is likely to have their forum account terminated with extreme prejudice, and if they realise you created a new account they'll terminate that too. If that company made a breaking change to the product and just destroyed a common use case - tough, they've done it and therefore it MUST be right because they know FAR more about how the product is used than their thousands of resellers who install and configure (often hacking the product around) to make it fit exact customer requirements. They don't listen. They don't admit to making mistakes, even when they're completely obvious. As far as they're concerned they don't make mistakes ever.

What I love about Veeam is not that they don't make mistakes - for sure they do. But they own them, own up to them, and above all they really listen and care what their partners and customers think and need from the products. If I could get one of my other vendors to fix / enhance product as easily as I can with Veeam my life would be SOO much less stressful.

I will say that sometimes 15 minutes (or less) on the phone / remote session can save hours of work time (on both sides) and days of elapsed time in resolving a problem. I will be very disappointed if Veeam withdraw any further from realtime live support. Right now for us the balance is about as far away from realtime on-phone as Veeam should go, and a little more "Hey let me know what time we can connect to sort this out" would be great. Some stuff is fine if it takes days of elapsed time to resolve - other stuff really isn't (but might not be a T1 / T2 issue).

[GrandAdmiral]

@david.domask - I've got a current example of my comment about L1 support for you on case #05492492. We're experiencing a quite unusual problem with a B&R job which has required me to open a support case. The progression so far has been:

Ticket Logged - I noted the name of the job, that I have done a fair whack of troubleshooting and dumped a complete set of logs for the last week
L1 replied - Noted that only one job appears in the logs and is currently fine (its the source backup job, the duplicate has problems) and requested new logs specifically for the problem job.
I reply - Fine no worries, perfectly reasonable request. I confirm the name of the job with an issue and that I will get new logs. Uploaded new logs specifically for the problem job
L1 (new tech) replies - Job is still not present in the logs, here's the how-to article for getting logs and can we get new ones (make sure it completes this time). That said, I can actually see one reference to the job in the logs which is showing a timeout error and referenced a very old article applicable to B&R installs with more than 100 jobs running simultaneously (this site has 2 jobs total).
Me - *exasperated sigh*

As I said above, no issue with the request to get additional logs by the first tech, I could have easily stuffed up at 3am. But to now request a third set of logs, verbatim repeating the instructions of the first tech, and referencing an unhelpful article that surely the existing 2 sets of logs would show does not apply in this scenario (there are 2 jobs on this instance, nowhere near 100) is a perfect example of L1 frustration. This is a P2 case, the site has now been unable to offsite backup for almost a full day, and I was pretty confident from the get-go that this was not going to be a simple solution based on the troubleshooting I've already performed.

On the positive side, first tech who replied was part of the Cloud/SP team and replied within 2 hours of initially logging the case so kudos to the improved response time.

[david.domask]

Hi @GrandAdmiral,

Thank you very much for letting me know on this. For the viewing audience, we have discussed in PM, and the situation is a bit tricky, but we have some action plans now; I do agree, the repeat log request was not necessary. In this case, I think it just might be confusion as it's a fairly unclear situation, but with some review I believe I can see where the issue is and we have some guidance now so it's a little less "blind". I really do appreciate your commentary both here and in the case, Benjamin, as your thoughts are exceptionally clear and in fact pretty helpful, and for me at least it helped get towards a decent working theory, which we're passing to the Engineer team to start with. Maybe I'm wrong (I often am ) but this is part of the research process: Research, Theory, Test, lather, rinse, and repeat. We eliminate elements until only the solution remains, and that process of research and confirm helps to rapidly move towards the actual answer

[ssharlow]

Have used Veeam for years. Had been happy. Last few years support has been non-existent. Recent case was last straw. Found something different and moving on.

[GrandAdmiral]

@david.domask - So my recent case has now been resolved, and I think it's a pretty good example of the collective frustration at L1 support. In summary:
-3 days of downtime
-4 different techs
-3 requests for logs (1 fulfilled) + my initial upload - I determined myself that the job was not actually generating any logs so further requests were useless.

Came down to a 2 minute fix (edit, save, rerun the job). Hopefully there are some lessons to be learned

[RubinCompServ]

@david.domask the issue was less about being routed to the wrong team, more that some jobs would be handed up to the Cloud Connect team unnecessarily...

This has been a long-standing issue for me. If I say in my ticket "I'm using vCloud", I have a better than 50% chance that the ticket will end up with a VCC engineer.

[johannesk]

I'm glad this was raised here on the forum, and I'm really happy to see that the reaction is so positive. I've been a Veeam user for more than 6 years now and I hope the quality comes to be the same as it was, but started going down about 2 years ago.

[AlexHeylin]

I did recently have to request an escalation to T2 after the T1 asked for the same logs and told me the same prerequisites (which I was already aware of and were in place before I opened the ticket) three times. When I called in, the (T1?) on the phone did have the decency to sound embarrassed after they'd read the last few ticket updates. This was on a P2 ticket which had been open at least two full days. Not being funny but I shouldn't really need to request an esc on a P2 after two days, that should be something Veeam are doing themselves. If a T1 is out of their depth, they should realise and escalate / get help themselves - not wait for the customer to call in and effectively complain that the T1 doesn't know what they're doing and then have to wait in the T2 Q for a review.

I realise the days of calling in and getting a T2-T3 on the phone in five mins are long gone, but please don't let this slip any further than where it is now. I'm sure I'm not the only person that actively hates half the vendors we use because their support is so terrible - I'd be really sad for Veeam to move towards my "hate list".

Case 05527017

[m.novelli]

Whenever I open a ticket with Microsoft or any other vendor I always to speak with T2 , I am already a T1 / T2.

I forcefully ask for higher lever technician until I'm redirected to T2

Marco

[chewbs]

I agree. I recently opened a ticket (Case # 05537380) about what I think is a deficiency in Backup copy jobs and from the jump it seemed like the agent did not even read my initial comments. Their first suggestion was to reseed a job in a mode that it was already running in. After having explained twice what my issue was, they finally agreed that what I was saying was correct, only to walk it back a business day later and suggest that my issue was because of a battery backup. I'm not sure where they got the idea that our servers were not on battery backups.. or how that would solve the issue.

I'm by no means an expert. I'm rather new to the field but even by my standards that was a pretty crumby experience

[masterofdisaster]

Veeam support has always been very helpful.

However I can agree to this post to some degree. I noticed it started to happening when everything went remote back in 2020.

I definitely blame covid. As a msp parter, I found it very easy at one point to log a case via support number and usually get a support tech on the line within minutes, the process defintely has slowed down a bit and sometimes you get assigned with a tech no where near your time zone.

[ksimon]

I know that this post has been quiet for a while, but I wanted to call out Jared F at Veeam support.
We just got through a couple of tickets that took quite a lot of time and effort to resolve.
05663468 and 05518317

Jared spent the time required to dig through the logs, KBs, etc to help us resolve these issues.
In my opinion, he went above and beyond and has helped me regain trust in your support teams.

Give him a raise
If you can't give him a raise, at least buy him a beer (or other tasty beverage of his choice).

[tcogghe1976]

I only needed Veeam support a handful of times over the past 2 years. The one time I felt support was taking too long I contacted other people at Veeam to... expedite my case. This is an approach you have to be really careful with, both in the frequency and the style you handle it. But it can work.

But in general I can't complain about Veeam at all.

[tamiand]

I totally agree with the previous posts. Veeam support has been completely useless for months. Something changed, maybe covid. It was much more qualitative and responsive before.

[dips]

Hi @tamiand,
Have you utilised the 'Talk to Manager' to report your concerns?
More here: https://www.veeam.com/kb2320

[colohost]

I agree with the previous comments above. In the old days a tech would call you back, create a screen share and the issue would be resolved in real time. It was a very positive experience as we knew our issue would be resolved the first time / first call. Now the emails back and forth are annoying as any clarification needs several back and forth emails before your issue can even begin to be worked on.

Your post made me think of Fortinet. Every time I open a ticket they want to immediately do a remote session, even if it's something that surely doesn't require one, and I'd actually greatly prefer to work on asynchronously via email with configs and logs; drives me crazy at times because the systems with access to the networks where we generally require support don't have any screen sharing type software on them, so it inevitably involves spinning up a VM, snapshot it, putting on the software they want, doing the support, reverting.

[dloseke]

Give him a raise If you can't give him a raise, at least buy him a beer (or other tasty beverage of his choice).

I was thinking the same for Matt Johnson. I had a long standing ticket that he resolved for me in August that was opened in March for my Service Provider Console issues after a few things seemed to pooch up my deployment. A couple other folks worked on things to get this working, but Matt stuck with it and saw it through to the end. Drinks on me!

[mkaec]

Jeffrey Koon was exemplary in a recent case. He dug deep into things and seemed like he really wanted to answer the question of what was going on. He kept coming back with creative ideas for work-arounds, too. Unfortunately, my case fell into the trap of "it's a bug, but we're not going to call it a bug". Jeffrey didn't have anything to do with that, though. My experience with him was first rate. Put him on the raise/drinks list.

[Frank_190]

Here are three tickets I opened in the last three or four months. They all show how support has gone downhill.

Current ticket. 05705866 Two people picked it up, and one will look into it. Still waiting to hear back on things. Also, I requested an update yesterday morning and still waiting to hear back.

05639943 — This one was not handled well, even the manager who got back to me after the fact stated it was poorly handled.

05636268 — This one started off like all the others. Thanks for opening a support ticket. Did you look at these random KB's. YES, they didn't make sense, and neither did the five others I read, that is why I am opening the support ticket. Then there is the I will get back to you after researching it. Wait, wait some more. Then ask for a follow-up.

Yes, Veeam support has gone downhill. Please fix this.

[DeLiriOusNoMaD]

support as MS is gone as well, since CV. it was so bad that once i opened a case, after first call they would not call you back or respond to emails!! i had to open another case to get someone on phone to deal with my prior case!!

[einhirn]

Have you utilised the 'Talk to Manager' to report your concerns?

Heh... The one time I tried that, I noticed that my case agent was also the manager I talked to. Awkward!

[rjordan63]

I have to say that the support I have gotten is horrible. I have been trying for 3 plus months to get help migrating a Veeam customer from one MSP to a new one.
I still have not got my issue resolved and the sales guy Jacob doesn't have any interest I guess because we are a small company.
We would love to use Veeam but definitely could use help getting started.

[veremin]

Hi, Randy,

Do you mind sharing the support case numbers with us, so we can share this with the support management and have them investigate?

Thanks!

[albertp]

I have to agree with previous comment from rjordan63. The tehcnical support is terible and I think they don't know the product well. They don't have sense of the logic how the business work. I'm trying to find the solution on how to fix the Veeam backup job if VMware perform DRS since last year but no one can help me until I gave up.

It's really so frustrated especially when the technical support is trying to blame VMware for doing DRS.

I just hope someone from Veeam is still care enough to contact me and help me as customer with my backup issue.

FYI I have the Entreprise Plus Edition license.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Albert and Randy,
can you please post your support ticket numbers here. Our Support management takes feedback very seriously and adjusts processes and training accordingly. So we are not just ignoring your input but really take action.

Hi Albert,
I am not sure about the details of your VMware DRS issue, but in general each VM will be marked as blocked for vmotion/storage vmotion/DRS before backup and we remove this flag afterwards. So, DRS can not move the VM during backup, which looks like the issue based on what you wrote.
However when we can not set this protection flag, then we ignore and just perform the backup as the backup is more important and it has a higher chance of completion.
The VMware Permissions needed are the following
Global - Disable methods
Global - Enable methods
with a scope of the whole vcenter (otherwise it does not work).
You can check as well in the logs for this entries. If we set them and DRS is still moving VMs ignoring the setting, then it is a bug on the VMware side.

[Gostev]

Sorry to ruin the party guys but I see this topic is actually from 2022, and it had only one post in 2023 - so there's really no reason to continue bumping it with some random issue now, two years later.

Furthermore, all complaints about the handling of specific support cases should always be submitted directly to the support management through the Talk to a Manager functionality in the Customer Portal, as explained in the forum rules. Remember that Support is a separate org from R&D here at Veeam, and all we PMs can do is share support ticket numbers to the same exact management escalation DL that receives messages from the above-mentioned form. So, just save yourself one hop (and also save us some time) and share your support quality concerns directly with the folks who can actually do something about it

Another relevant Veeam fact: our Support is actually a part of the same org with Renewals, so the top management there is naturally interested in keeping each and every customer happy I really can't stop appreciating how genius the decision on such structure was!