Who actually has vendor support that is worth it?

Posted by viking_linuxbrother@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 50 comments

Vendor support has evolved into an bewildering sport of kicking the can down the road via SLAs, internal processes, transfers and putting the entire onus on your to keep your case going 24/7. The companies that pretended to have in-house support are all blatantly outsourced to Accenture and Convergsys with a delay, deny and escalate playbook. Most companies that did have good support have been acquired and had support layoffs so they can get onto the outsourced pipeline. No one has phone numbers and many don't even have a "new case" support site button. The most popular pipeline I see is AI chat to knowledge base link dump to email to questionaire to generic conference call scheduled via email to log collection that takes 48 hours minimum to a choose your own adventure of blame or solve.

Blame:

* a different vendor

* too long since the incident happened so we can't collect accurate logs

* you collected the logs wrong, please collect them again and wait another 48 hours for analysis

Solve

* We don't see anything, there is no follow up for us.

* It could be us but it looks related to x department so open a ticket with them.

* We found a random note in our knowledge base, Your firmware level is out of date, please upgrade to X version. Thanks.

Does anyone actually deserve your support dollars in 2026?

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GX_EN@reddit

I worked for a Nutanix partner for a really long time and their support relative to the other vendors I’ve dealt with, it was far superior.
Dell and VMWare being the worst.

tylrat93@reddit

I’ve had great experiences with enterprise Dell support, such as Powerstore, but if you mean regular ProSupport yes it’s garbage but I only ever interacted with them to get warranty repairs dispatched lol

My MSP was a Nutanix partner as I noted. Our first very large account supporting Nutanix they had it on about 80 Dell nodes and multiple clusters across two data centers in the Midwest. The support was absolutely the worst.
When their leases were up, we moved everything off that to NX hardware running AHV other than a couple clusters they needed on VMWare. Night and day from a support standpoint.

the901@reddit

Do you find yourself having to contact support more often with Nutanix vs VMware? That’s been my experience. The support is better with Nutanix but I’m having to deal with them more.

jailh@reddit

Had great contacts with VMware... 10 years ago. Now it's, you know, Broadcom...

tarvijron@reddit

Our TAM is still excellent but the support they rely upon is pretty rough.

Nutanix support has gotten noticeably worse over time. With that in mind, it's still the best.

TheSpearTip@reddit

Veeam outsourcing their support to Costa Rica and India means the days of them being super good are gone now, and I say that as someone who used to be there.

BeattieBlitz@reddit

Is that what happened to Veeam? I've noticed a stark drop in their support performance over the past year or so.

r0cksh0x@reddit

Cohesity

PictureFamiliar1267@reddit

Patch My PC support is amazing!

ThEGr33kXII@reddit

Paxton door access support is extremely good.

Low-Stand-3653@reddit

I second this one!

VviFMCgY@reddit

Pure and Rubrik

slobis@reddit

I can’t believe I’m saying this but ManageEngine.

sqnch@reddit

PatchMyPC are great

Wolfram_And_Hart@reddit

Pax8 has been good to us.

Paintraine@reddit

Devicie have been excellent so far. My client engaged them as part of their workstation Intune migration, and as far as a vendor goes, they are by far one of the best the client has. Responsive, knowledgeable, eager to help.

DrAtomic1@reddit

Nutanix hands down!

LowMight3045@reddit

I’ ve heard that too

CPAtech@reddit

Pure is top notch.

justmirsk@reddit

I came here to say that Pure Storage support is top notch.

hevvypiano@reddit

VMWare support pre-Broadcom was excellent.

Even the Dominican Republic era was great compared to right now. Just nobody with any ownership.

what_dat_ninja@reddit

Expensify has been pretty good in my opinion

ClassicTBCSucks93@reddit

Worked at a place where I reported to a non-technical manager who had a hardon for Revu Bluebeam. Our Adobe Pro licenses were coming up for renewal and she made the push for me to contact Revu, get pricing, etc. The sales 'engineer' promised the world, breakout training sessions for our different depts covering all the tools was supposedly going to be their responsibility.

Once she signed the contract, the sales guy basically did a 180 on his word before the ink even dried. Training was going to be 100% on me as they were too cheap to pay their egregious hundreds of dollars per hour project fees for training. Go-live was a complete shitshow as you can imagine, the tools and UI heavily favor engineers, project managers, and designers who regularly view floorplans to do markups, the bulk of other users had no use for that. Worst two months of my life bar none.

indigo196@reddit

HPE Aruba has been fantastic for me.

Stonewalled9999@reddit

My Toshiba dude does. US based support. THEY have to deal with offshore but (usually) they have me document what I need and they chase the offshore. They also quickly fix any issues we have (and we don't have many)

Horsemeatburger@reddit

OpenNebula support has been very good, CrowdStrike as well, Google support (on the few occasion we needed it) was good.

Palo Alto and Fortinet are meh (not horrible, but could be a lot better), Dell the same, HP and HPE slighly worse.

Not IT, but Axis (CCTV and access control) has been great as well.

As someone else said, Microsoft support is horseshit but thankfully we no longer have to deal with them.

M4niac81@reddit

Meraki support are excellent, raise a tier 1 or 2 support case and you get an almost instant call back from someone that can actually help and the one occasion I had to get a hardware item swapped out it was really efficient. I've also had excellent support from peer software who make a replication product we use, take the time to understand the issue and their software will automatically gather and send in logs with the support case number attached so no painful tedious information gathering.

These are both premium products thou, but I guess you get what you pay for.

CAMx264x@reddit

AWS is great if you spend enough money(at least 300k a month). We’ve had them in house three times this year and are able to get any high priority ticket escalated and a bridge started within 30 minutes.

simpleglitch@reddit

Arista's TAC has been great, not just response time, but I've had good luck with them troubleshooting connections between them and another vendor's equipment without them wasting time on pointing fingers.

PureStorage I've always had good luck with as well, but also very rarely ever need to use them. I've had more issues with corporate account settings than I've ever had with the actually array.

For commodity hardware, Dell is the least bad out of vendors I can use.

Palo is a toss up, sometimes there great sometimes it feels like running in circles. Also heads up they are LLM-ing a lot of the front line which doesn't boost confidence for me.

HPE has been bad enough to make me switch off to Dell. Feels the most motivated out of all the vendors I work with to find a reason that the issue is outside of warranty or support.

elatllat@reddit

The best support I ever got was from open source projects. Linux, Tomcat, PostgreSQL, Fedora, Ceph etc.

fuzzyfrank@reddit

Threatlocker has been great

Impressive-Pants@reddit

Good question, everyone I can think use to have great support, but no longer.. Datto for example.

Dracozirion@reddit

Any support that isn't outsourced. I like the support of Patch My PC, Admin By Request and SentinelOne. HPE, Yealink and Ruckus are still reasonable, Veeam is meh, used to be great. Fortinet is meh depending on the product, used to be good (FortiWeb, FortiAuthenticator & Fortimail still have good support, Forticlient & FortiOS below expectations). Broadcom and Microsoft are pure horseshit (Microsoft being the absolute worst).

Gern-Blanston@reddit

Commvault.

mrbios@reddit

I always pay for vendor support when storage is involved. StarWind in my case, support from them is great.

3sysadmin3@reddit

Crowdstrike manafed services (complete) is great. Their tech support used to also be good but they seem very understaffed anymore.

Amusingly, I put in ticket other day for basically a bug. Got AI response immediately that I admit was best bot experience I've had (addressed multiple parts of ticket but no surprise couldn't offered fix for a bug). It was a better response than the human response a few hours later that the human hadn't digested whole ticket properly 🙄

goblet-sama@reddit

For now i got a great suport with fortinet and datto ( especialy the bcdr team)

WizardsOfXanthus@reddit

Kronos (UKG) support was always really great when I needed assistance. Lawson (Infor) wasn't too bad either. We paid for the best support package with both, and maybe that's why, but I was always able to get things taken care of within the same day.

Wow, how long ago was ukg really great for you ? That's far from our experience

I've moved on to a different position within the organization, but I was the Kronos admin for four years, so between 2021 and 2025. We were migrating our system with our parent company during 2024, so even through that year, they were great in helping when needed.

Wild.

juitar@reddit

Meraki support is pretty good

Jeff-J777@reddit

Lenovo has been good for our desktop/laptops, but we get premier support with everything. Veeam support has been good as well. When we had a ransomware incident, I had a team from Veeam assigned to me to help with all the restores.

shimoheihei2@reddit

I remember the days when vendor support meant something. But for the past 10-15 years all the big tech companies outsourced their support and it went to crap. Now it seems to be more like a checkbox item, not something that can actually be used for something useful.