PLEASE consider giving an option to us, your customers, to purchase technical support directly from you. For example, you could provide yearly plans with different SLAs and different costs.
This would be a great service for many of us, who are either resellers of your products or provide services based on them, but do not (and cannot) have close access to the software development process in order to follow all new features (and bugs/regressions) closely, but still have to respond to our client’s queries in a timely manner. Your support agents (L1) or engineers (L2) could coordinate very closely with your dev team and thus address issues very efficiently, making your products even more dependable and appealing for large and/or demanding deployments such as High Availability clusters, health/enterprise networks etc.
I am explaining why I believe that direct support from MkTik has a special value. Especially now, that the current ROS release is still quite active and receives continuous, major feature updates. Having the support team next door to the dev team can make a huge difference in the quality of the provided support.
I know, but then he explains his reasons and those are entirely not consistent with that.
RouterOS new releases and potential bugs have nothing to do with paid SLA and configuration assistance.
What I am asking is, in addition to the free (and best effort) support you are now providing via help.mikrotik.com/servicedesk, to also establish a number of adequately priced plans with specific SLAs for us who need more timely responses and are willing to pay for them. Private consultants are fine when you want to design or update your infrastructure, but probably are not always up-to-date with the more recent features of ROS. I am a MTCINE myself with more than 10 years of Mikrotik experience, but sometimes I struggle to understand why a feature/function os ROS is behaving the way it does or refuses to work how I expect it to.
All major enterprise networking vendors offer paid support plans for a reason and the reason is less stress and better performance for the field engineers when time is sparse.
MikroTik is a very small team. We rely on our distributors and consultants for support. Our total (!) number of people in the company is well below what would be required to have such services.
Thank you for the insightful answer. I perfectly understand this fact and thank you again for the great work this small team is pulling through. You guys are the one vendor in the world who has made serious networking affordable for the “masses”. That is, for all of us who cannot spare one kidney every time we need to buy a professional grade router or switch for ourselves or a client. For me in specific, Mikrotik has been the school where I acquired all the networking knowledge I am now making a living out of. I can only feel grateful for this and wish to meet all of you in person some day.
Nevertheless, it would probably be worth it for your marketing team to do an business analysis of such a scenario. What if the tech support has the potental to open up markets where Mikrotik currently has minimal or no penetration, such as the enterprise market and thus increase your revenue, in addition to the money it will bring directly? Is it possible that it could be a self-sustainable service that will pay for the extra staff and also boost the overall prestige of the brand?
Anyway, you know your market and priorities. I only keep hearing comments and also feeling myself the need for such a service and thought of bringing it up.
If you do acquire more staff, I vote for coders and testers. I think you already have a great marketing team and from all outward appearances a strong supportive group of colleagues.
And this is another reason why MT should consider paid plans. This option provides an opportunity to strengthen the development / support team, and customers who opt for a paid plan will have better support (e.g., priority resolution of reported bugs instead of waiting “years” for a solution). Without this option, it is impossible to be considered a serious vendor in SMB markets (not to mention the ENTERPRISE environments).
Considering the same folks that do YouTube videos also answer tickets, we’re not dealing with cisco here… And I like the Latvian sardonic charm .
I do get OP’s problem. You can certainly hire a consultant to help setup a system. But issue is a consultant cannot guarantee future support of anything — MT has no real product roadmaps or a policy on EOL. But it’s not some “paid support plans” alone that help much – since those are backed by a lot of other “big company” things to offer high-end support, like TAMs, prod mgmt, “job aids”, and importantly extensive documentation…
But I’ve never gotten the vibe Mikrotik wants to be a big company. And they lean on partners to fill in industry-specific needs to avoid needing to be big. To partners, they leave a lot of margin over a cisco/etc to fill in those gaps.
In my market, I could use some Peplink for “MultiWANs” at 3-5x the cost of similar Mikrotik. And I sometime do use them. But can assure you their support is similar or worse (e.g. go to reseller first, or try their forum). My belief is any serious networking solution be bench tested before deployment — so only thing with Mikrotik config is complex so more careful testing is required. While with a “brand-name” you might be able to skip the testing and lean on support…but at 3x cost & risk a problem may still take days to resolve by a “brand name” even with paid support.
To me, more+better docs would help a lot AVOID needing support. Whether paid, via ticket, or posting here – if there were more step-by-step docs it really help a lot. Without adding more people to explain the same things over-and-over.
I’ve only watched two of the Mikrotik YouTube videos so far, my first thought/question was “Why doesn’t the documentation have and explain this?” I cut out close to 100 filters/rules on one router after.
But even the video was missing pieces of the puzzle. Oh well..
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