Feedback on Veeam technical support

[Gostev]

I was browsing the forum to see if I can find a solution to my Veeam replication issue, and stumble on this thread. I have a support case open on this issue. The initial reply from Veeam was after hours, which is fine since this is not an urgent case. The initial reply have me go through a wmi query. My query came back with permission issue, which I email back to Veeam support.

The next response from Veeam is to contact Microsoft to fix this problem first. My initial reaction is "this is bad". They have not even look at the environment, and already blame the problem on Microsoft. I've seen some bad customer service before. This is one of those rare time that I see the vendor blame on someone else right away.

Wait... so you say "right away", but in reality (according to what you have just explained) it was after they had you reproduce the issue without Veeam in the picture by running the WMI query against the affected server manually? And if that is the case, the next step would indeed be to troubleshoot the malfunctioning API issue with Microsoft, as Veeam does not have access to the WMI source code and so we are unable to debug this WMI call to understand where exactly it fails in your environment and why.

Now, of course if it was a known issue with the verified solution available based on earlier support cases, trust me they would have just told you immediately what to do to fix your issue, as they maintain internal KB on all commonly reported problems and solutions for all issues which may prevent our product from functioning.

[HHo]

You are right. The word "right away" is a bit exaggeration on my part. The first email was the wmi query command. After the query command did not work, the second email said basically to contact Microsoft to fix the wmi query, then come back to Veeam support to continue with troubleshooting. By the way, the query that Veeam sent did not work on a another replication job (a working one). All this in two email messages.

I replied back asking Veeam to take a look at my environment first before pushing me over to Microsoft. The reply back was a KNOWN issue. Veeam sent me the link to download the fixed dll file, and the instructions on where and how to replace the file. My issue is fixed after that.

As most of us on this forum, we are all in "tech support" in some forms. For me personally when helping my customers (aka users), I would not lay the blame on another person/vendor/product (almost right away) without thoroughly looking at the problem first. That was my gripe.

[Gostev]

Got it, thanks for clarifying the whole story. Sounds like T1 escalated to T2 to perform the review of your environment, and T2 engineer knew the issue - or something along these lines. I agree, in this case there is the real issue with how your support case was handled by your engineer, and something our support management should review and fix.