When you go out and buy yourself new hardware or software you have the option of purchasing maintenance agreements at the same time. For software this generally provides the ability to constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest product. For hardware this tends to provide onsite support for when things go wrong and an SLA around that support arriving and the hardware being fixed.

I’ve been dealing with hardware and software vendors for years, I thought I’d share a couple of stories the really depict excellent service and the stuff that you never want to deal with as a customer.

The bad

When I started at one of my previous positions I walked into a Dell shop. If you aren’t familiar with that term it means that all hardware purchased was through Dell and that it gave us steeper discounts on the hardware that we would purchase.

I was put in charge of the Windows team pretty early at this company and we started to go through a hardware refresh. I sat down with the team and started asking questions about how things were with Dell. To a person they liked the hardware and what it delivered however they hated the service. There were common problems with SLAs not being met, the wrong replacement parts being delivered and phone support being unable to provide decent assistance.

I brought these issues to the Dell account rep and explained that we were looking at a fairly significant budget spend the next year on hardware (>$1m) and that I needed to see better results from the support team over there if I was going to spend any of that money with them.

Over the next 6 months I thoroughly documented every engagement with their support staff. This support engagements included:

• Server down – customer impact
• Hardware problem, replacement part needed – non-customer impacting
• General troubleshooting assistance required – non-customer impacting

I’m sad to say that Dell was only able to meet the 4 x 7 x 365 agreement we had for hardware support in 10% of the cases that we opened. Techs would show up late (or not at all), parts would be incorrect even when the tech was onsite in time (techs did not bring the parts, they would be delivered separately) and we would have trouble getting anything above a level 2 tech person on the phone who’s troubleshooting ability seemed to be limited to “have you tried turning it off and back on again”.

This was several years ago and Dell might have significantly improved their support since then, however when I left the company we did not have a single Dell server in any of the three datacenters I had built out.

The good

Software has bugs. We all know that and have experienced problems with vendor applications, but what happens when you run into a significant issue and how does the vendor respond?

Recently SQLSentry released a new version of their Performance Advisor for SQL Server tool which is for monitoring and tuning SQL Server. I performed an upgrade to the new version and resumed monitoring, I didn’t run into any issues or problems.

A couple of days later I got a call from our Windows folks stating they had an alarm on high memory utilization on the monitoring server. I logged in to take a look and was shocked to see the SQLSentry monitoring service had consumed over 5GB of memory. I bounced the service and it reset itself. Over the next couple of days memory usage increased again, causing me to restart the service.

At this point I engaged the support folks, in particular Jason Hall (blog|twitter). We started triaging the issue.

We started up perfmon and captured a few counters to file to try and localize the memory leak. This allowed us to discover the leak was in unmanaged code, making the trouble a lot tougher to track down.

The next step was to install the Windows Debugging Tools from Microsoft. With these deployed and a set of symbols downloaded we used UMDH to capture the before and after log heap allocations for the monitoring service. One comparison log later and we were able to track the issue down to a leak in Microsoft’s managed wrapper for the VDS (Virtual Disk Service) subsystem which is used by SQLSentry to monitor mount points.

I’m running several multi-node, multi-instance SQL Server Failover Clustered Instances and make extensive use of mount points (current count is 136 monitored mount points).

To test and confirm that VDS was the actual issue one of the SQLSentry development team threw together a very small 50 line application that I could hit a couple of buttons on an watch memory usage. It took a bit of a tired mouse finger, but I was able to verify quickly that VDS was indeed the problem.

Now fully understanding the problem in hand the SQLSentry team quickly built their own COM wrapper to handle mount point monitoring and provided me with a new build of the product. I went through a standard deployment and started the services back up again. A week later and the service is still running at around 500MB.

Throughout the process of problem triage, issue identification and resolution it was a very engaged support process with an appropriate level of urgency for each of the steps. Everything was handled to completion and I have been very happy with the support I received. That’s why my maintenance for this product will be renewed next year. I know that the money spent is worth it.

TL;DR

In the past I have spent a lot of money on very high levels of support from Dell and received nothing but poor service. As a result they lost several million dollars of business.

On the flip side I spent a small amount of money on maintenance with SQLSentry and received excellent support and levels of engagement which will help retain me as a long term customer.

I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with these vendors,  or any other.