“Enterprise” software support
Posted on November 12th, 2007 by matt
One of the things I really hate about most “enterprise” software is that there is very little by way of useful online community resources. Having a problem with ClearCase? What’s Up Gold? CA eTrust Directory? You’re pretty much stuck dealing with the vendor support department, and they are generally not very helpful.
Is there some great site out there I’m missing where sysadmin types discuss the problems they’re having with this sort of software? Because while a lot of what you’ll find searching for answers to OSS problems is people asking exactly the same question and getting no answers, at least there’s some chance of finding an answer or a clue that’ll put you on the right trail.
Popularity: 47% [?]
On the flip side, there’s more chance of finding someone you know or work with who knows the subject matter and can provide useful information. For example, dealing with MySQL performance problems was a nightmare but it’s always easy to ask a DBA to talk Oracle or Sybase or whatever they specialise in, and we all know a DBA who specialises in the majors.
Most admit for eTrust I’d be asking you for hints pretty quickly, since I don’t know anyone else who has used it much.
Don’t know if I’d stretch as far as calling What’s Up an enterprise application, though.
OSS support seems to be fine if (and only if) you’re running Linux, you’re using the latest and greatest (probably beta) release, and you’re having problem with something exceedingly popular. Anything Open Source that is truly multiplatform, well behaved, stable and civilised tends to have good enough documentation and a stable release schedule and one doesn’t need to seek random google responses so much.
Yeah, but when that one person you can go to doesn’t know what you need, you’re back at square one. And chances are the documentation is incredibly obtuse, intended more as a way of ticking the “has documentation” box while still leaving lots of opportunities to sell training and consulting services than as actual documentation useful for learning about the product…
Some vendors are better than others, of course. Sun’s documentation is less-bad than many others, when the hamster powering docs.sun.com isn’t taking a break.
You’ll certainly find sysadmins discussing problems with Enterprise software over in the Scary Devil Monastery (and you *know* who taught me the pejorative phrase “Pyrne Pnfr” there), but it’s a bit short of solutions that don’t involve razor blades. The Other Place can be quite a bit more useful.
Open Source tends to draw a lot more community, and of course you and others can read the source to find out what it’s really doing. Having a black box and *not* being able to pop the hood and look inside when that would otherwise be my next move is one of the really frustrating things with closed source. And, of course, there’s the feeling that if the software itself goes for $BIGNUM thousands, support for it must be worth quite a lot too, so there’s not the free help out there that would naturally accompany software that was itself free. I guess people who have paid for shrinkwrapped boxes need to recoup some of that somehow.
Oh, and WUG is obviously not “enterprise” because it’s relatively cheap and it bloody well works.
No, WUG is not enterprise because one can’t spin a hugely profitable consulting industry out of it
Not the way one can spin profit from OpenView, SystemEdge, InfoVista, CiscoWorks, and all the rest of that nonsense. I like Hyperic for free/cheap and works, myself.
Most people I know are just grabbing the PDFs from docs.sun.com and stashing them locally these days, so when things go titsup you’ve got the docs instead of watching that monstrous site go off with the pixies for a day or two.
Oh, and the ‘great site’ you originally alluded to? IRC, man, IRC. You’d be surprised.