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kraal
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Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 12:19 pm

Dear fellow Mikrotik product owners and users,
Sorry to ask what may look like a provocative question, but do you get answers from Mikrotik support team when you open tickets and if yes what's the average time before you get this answer?
I currently have two open tickets, one of which was created on the 9th of April, and got only an automatic answer at ticket creation time "reply might take up to 3 business days".
Best regards,
 
fragtion
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 1:17 pm

The main reason I log support tickets is to bring a specific issue to official attention of Mikrotik support, so that they have a tangible record of the issue on file. If you just complain about something on the forums then there's a good chance it will be overlooked or forgotten..

So the hope is that by logging a ticket through the official channels for support and providing as much specific information about the issue/fault (while trying to keep the report as concise as possible), that it could maybe receive prioritized attention for fault acknowledgement and fixing...

In terms of response times, it seems to vary... Some faults I logged took several months just for a simple acknowledgement response... others were replied to within minutes of logging the fault.

When answers/replies eventually arrive, they tend to be very short & succinct, with not much informative details by way of feedback, which can seem disappointing if you've waited a long time for a response and the issue is significant and affects many people. For instance, the last reply I got was just a simple:
Hi

Thank you for contacting MikroTik Support.

Thanks for the report will be fixed in the future.

Best Regards
But most responses came from senior support staff (at least in my experiences so far) and include some positive feedback or acknowledgement, which is reassuring.

Users must keep in mind that support staff are also humans trying to best manage their time. With RouterOS v7 being in a crucial stage of development right now, customers should understand and appreciate that support resources may not be operating as optimally as usual in the customer's interests, despite best intentions to the contrary. Developers are under more pressure to ready the OS for enterprise-level stability in a constrained time frame, and support staff are also dealing with an influx of tickets relating to stability issues and bugs with v7 (over and above the usual day-to-day and v6-related issues which I'm sure are plenty). That was not normally the case before. Also, just because you logged a fault, doesn't mean that developers will stop everything they're doing just to pour all resources into fixing your fault and keeping you up to date of every detail along the way. Be patient, you've done your part, it is (hopefully) appreciated, and will be seen and taken into consideration at the very least.

Support staff, in turn, must keep in mind that users give up a lot of personal time, money, and patience/resources to not only stick with MikroTik products/platform during turbulent times when faced with things like crucial missing features, failed upgrades, or incidents of config loss... but we also to spend a great deal of our time investigating issues and logging detailed faults and supouts when problems arise. So it is important that support honors their users' contributions in return, by ensuring fast and detailed replies where possible. When replies don't come, or they eventually come but with little to no new information, it sends a bad signal to the customer that they are wasting time logging faults and that their business as an individual customer is not valuable to the company. This could persuade some users to think that they would be better off seeking other vendors and ecosystems. That is only worsened further when support ignores genuine concerns/issues for several months, or blatantly denies that it is a problem (such as the SXT 5HnD first revision water ingress problem or CCR2004/RB3011/RB5009 port flapping issues, just to name two such cases)...

So in summary, a functioning and well-reputed support system depends on complementary & mutual input. Users should take care and effort to ensure that tickets are logged properly and about real/important issues only. And support could do better in response time, response details in the initial acknowledgement, as well as frequency of updates. At the moment you're lucky when you eventually get a reply, unlikely to receive any technical information relating to the issue, and unlikely to receive further updates until you maybe see the issue magically fixed in a new version or show up in a changelog. Not very reassuring, but probably understandable given the current situation

I don't think your question is provocative. I think it is pertinent and helps to know that you are not alone in perceiving that the support system gives an impression that there's some room for improvement.. It's the one place where communication should be fast and efficient. In reality, support ticket systems suck and are a pain to manage, maintain, and keep up to date, especially in busy times like now. Fact of the matter is that it's an extraneous process (just like documentation & changelog preparation) which takes time and resources away from furthering the actual software which is ultimately the leading priority for all of us... So best advice I can give you is to keep that in mind . If you've done your part submitting a ticket, try to forget about it and not take it personally when support are slow to respond because after all it's no longer your problem anyway right? If Mikrotik care about their product and brand, they will surely honor your ticket within a reasonable time frame. If not, then you have the power to take your business elsewhere and let fate handle the rest.

I'm sure a lot of users who expect unrealistic levels of perfection, have shot themselves in the foot doing precisely that because they are too impulsive or impatient. Such users are actually much more commonplace than we might think and I've seen it with my own eyes how a small issue can cause a user to ditch an entire platform and then they waste more time and money looking for alternative brands and products which invariably turn out to be inferior and even more cumbersome to work with. There's a reason Mikrotik are recognized as a leading brand & industry standard on the global scale. Yes it's not perfect (remember, nothing really is) - especially not for everyone, such as users who expect it to be as "user friendly" and interactive as unifi products for instance, but that is for good reason, and some unfortunate users have learned that too late, after short-fused temper tantrums were thrown and hardware was disposed of as a result. Those users could probably benefit in the long run from doing some serious self-reflection & introspection
Last edited by fragtion on Tue May 03, 2022 2:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
kraal
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 1:57 pm

@fragtion I asked a simple question: do you get answers and if yes how much time does it take to get them. No need to write an essay to answer this closed-ended question.

Their automated message states "up to three business days". If they do not consider this sentence a commitment, I would prefer to have them write "we'll reply when we can and if we consider that it is required. If you have no answer after 5 business days consider the case as being in our backlog and check future releases. Thank you for your cooperation." Otherwise it's just a deceptive message which makes people wait for an answer that may never come.

Side note: I'm aware that their support is "limited" and that they ask customers to directly ask their distributors for support. However the distributors do not always have the information which is requested.
 
fragtion
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 2:13 pm

@fragtion I asked a simple question: do you get answers and if yes how much time does it take to get them. No need to write an essay to answer this closed-ended question.
Noted but largely dismissed advice, mate. Simple questions don't always mean simple answers, and I don't think the answer to your simple question really is as simple as you'd probably like. I also doubt you really need me to remind you that the choice to read or acknowledge my response at all (for what it's worth) is entirely your free choice... Take it or leave it... It's there if you need it, complete with more details you could have ever asked for, and a multi-angled perspective/approach of an answer going above and beyond what you would have expected. For me, it's usually not a bad thing when that type of thing happens, but yes we're all different in some ways and yes you're welcome regardless (although I will make an effort to remember your alias and avoid further interactions with you in future). Hope you still find the response you're truly looking for, lol. maybe someone will deliver it to you on a golden platter served just the way you like it :) Otherwise, I'm sure my response will benefit another user searching the forum for a detailed, more "open-ended" discussion for the same question you just asked, in which case my (free) service which was originally intended for your benefit, will ultimately not be in vain after all! :) Cheerios
Last edited by fragtion on Tue May 03, 2022 2:30 pm, edited 4 times in total.
 
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 2:20 pm

@fragtion I asked a simple question: do you get answers and if yes how much time does it take to get them. No need to write an essay to answer this closed-ended question.
The simplest reply:

Depends.
 
fragtion
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 2:33 pm

@fragtion I asked a simple question: do you get answers and if yes how much time does it take to get them. No need to write an essay to answer this closed-ended question.
The simplest reply:

Depends.
I'm sure he/she finds this answer increasingly more satisfying and informative. I guess it's true that less really is more 😂 Funny shit.
 
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anav
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 3:18 pm

@rextended, I think you are mixing up your purchases with replies on the forum.
............................
depends.jpeg
\........


jajajajajaja

Seriously, I usually get a response within 5 days.
Anything longer than that means they are swamped with other work or they dont like you! Take your pick. :-)
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 3:24 pm

Oh my god 🙄...
 
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anav
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 3:24 pm

Oh my god 🙄...
I shouldnt have told them you are "small-medium" aka average ;-)) ???
 
pe1chl
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 5:37 pm

I agree with the long story that @fragtion wrote. Even when it may not be convenient to @kraal.
When you have a business to run, and you require replies and fixes with a couple of days, the mikrotik support will not be sufficient for you.
But they DO pickup requests, and I have several of them that resulted in a fix, but indeed it can be months later.
Remember we buy MikroTik equipment at comparatively low prices and it "includes support".
When you need a SLA and/or guaranteed support, you can buy equipment at 3-4 times the price and still have the obligation to have a "service contract" (a recurring payment) to even have someone read your request and file it under some "will not be resolved" category. To have immediate attention costs even more.
So that is your choice.
 
kraal
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 7:19 pm

I agree with the long story that @fragtion wrote. Even when it may not be convenient to @kraal.
It's not that it is not convenient to me nor that I don't agree with fragtion. I don't think that having forum members trying to guess "why" the situation is the current one helps at all. Only Mikrotik officials could give information about the reasons about current situation, but they won't (or don't want to). Fragtion's root cause analysis, mine or anyone's else are just guts feeling, and as such do not help much getting factual information about what other customers are experiencing, and do not help current / future readers benchmark their own experience.

Anyway, now that we have a topic with underpants pictures (I'm sure anav is giggling in front of his screen and that he's proud of himself, I just wonder why he takes pictures of products he buys) I guess that we can share opinions now.

When you have a business to run, and you require replies and fixes with a couple of days, the mikrotik support will not be sufficient for you.
Ultimately, the problem is not the fact that one has to wait (for instance I can wait). However writing that the user will get an an answer in the comming three days and not getting an answer is a problem (at least for me). Also note that all support questions are not related to bugs, they can also be clarification requests (they could answer with a "yes" or "no", no need to implement a fix then)

But they DO pickup requests, and I have several of them that resulted in a fix, but indeed it can be months later.
I personally still have to experience this. From my experience, so far it's an urban legend. We'll see in a few months then.

To have immediate attention costs even more.
Sure! But then, again, if they do not plan answering questions, writing "it can take up to three days" is a marketing BS or someone left Jira portal's default automatic answer email or some intern trying to make thing "sound right" by putting "up to 3 days" in the message template and nobody checked his work or what was once true is now obsolete and nobody cross-checked old templates.

That being said I'll finally react to the "RouterOS v7 being in a crucial stage of development right now" part of fragtion's initial answer: if this opinion reflect the reality, it means that a 26 years old company, 3d largest company in Latvia, with an estimated value in 2021 of 1.24 billion Euros has no dedicated team for end-user support and/or needs to scavenge internal resources to deliver a new version of its product. This sounds like a receipe for failure. Or at least it does not bother anything good for the future.
 
Zacharias
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 7:50 pm

From my personal experience, every time i opened a ticket i got a reply back if not the same day, the next one...
They are really helpful...
 
fragtion
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 8:21 pm

Yeah that 3 day message is definitely a problem.. It makes the user expect an imminent response which, as we all know, may not arrive within that time frame (or near to it). No surprise then why users are disappointed when the response is slow.

Also can't fault anything else you said, including the way you framed my views as being that of subjective opinion, as that is precisely what they are. It's just that I've spent a lot more time on these forums lately than the average joe so I thought it would be worthwhile giving a run-down of my own thought processes and conclusions about what I also consider to be some important questions.

I guess there's a fine line between just asking a fair question or simply pointing out some glaring anomalies as you've done, versus being (to use your own term) provocative. And again I wouldn't consider your question provocative in that sense, assuming the intention is not to stir any negative publicity but rather to establish consensus about shared perceptions/experiences where no-one else seems to be talking about it. Besides, it is important for consumers to uphold high product standards and someone's got to do the "dirty" work in that regard. I just wanted to make the suggestion that there's a certain level of lenience we as customers also need to exercise - a benefit of the doubt that these anomalies are probably more short-term than anything, and that we should be looking at the situation a bit more wholistically in that sense - through a lens biased in favor of realism as opposed to idealism, as a probable explanation for some questionable observations. After all, we chose this brand and/or its products at our own accord, so to an extent we'll just need to live with any consequences of our own decisions - good or bad. If we did our research beforehand, we'd know that this is just the way MikroTik operates and always has been operating. No use trying to be the proverbial tail that wags the dog after the fact because of our own enthusiasm about striving for perfection, right? Well, we can certainly try, but no outcomes are guaranteed so let's not set ourselves up for any disappointment, lol xD Suffice it to say that if it weren't for this particular level of lenience being willfully exercised on my own part, I would have ditched this brand and its products ages ago. Having recently been forced to netinstall yet another failed software upgrade of a remote site, that fuse is running shorter than it's been in the past, I can probably say that much. But with the advances we're seeing in 7.2, the potential for awesomeness on the horizon seems as undeniable as ever. Just gotta persevere a little longer (I hope) haha
Last edited by fragtion on Tue May 03, 2022 8:54 pm, edited 3 times in total.
 
pe1chl
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 8:35 pm

I normally consider it like this: what number of man-hours from a highly qualified technician can you pay from the profit that you can guess that MikroTik makes on a $59 router? or a $299 router?
Even though I have bought several different devices, and even more devices have been bought following my advice to others, I still think MikroTik spent more man hours on my questions and/or remarks than they made money from me.
So that has to be compensated by lots of sales to people that never report any problem.
 
fragtion
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 8:44 pm

I normally consider it like this: what number of man-hours from a highly qualified technician can you pay from the profit that you can guess that MikroTik makes on a $59 router? or a $299 router?
Even though I have bought several different devices, and even more devices have been bought following my advice to others, I still think MikroTik spent more man hours on my questions and/or remarks than they made money from me.
So that has to be compensated by lots of sales to people that never report any problem.
I don't know hey... everywhere I go these days there seems to be a Mikrotik router, or a few. I'd consider it pretty much ubiquitous at this point (pun intended xD). Maybe it's just a thing here in my country. Either way that suggests to me that the product sales volumes are somewhat off the charts to the point that production probably can't even keep up with the demand... and stock availability at local retailers here would suggest a similar story. Sure, chip shortages play a part, but I strongly doubt they're struggling to pay any staff or contractors. What they lose from economy price point is made up in terms of sheer sales volume. But again what do I know and yeah, we'd probably be diving into another off-topic can of worms by entertaining that one any further, lol
 
kraal
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 10:42 pm

I normally consider it like this: what number of man-hours from a highly qualified technician can you pay from the profit that you can guess that MikroTik makes on a $59 router? or a $299 router?
That's one way of looking at things. Another one is to evaluate how many FTEs you should hire when you have 200k routers deployed worldwide and your product relies heavily on a operating system (200k is the estimated number of Mikrotik routers compromized in 2018 related to CVE-2018-14847). You don't need many as you rely on distributors but you need some FTEs to run the core support team. Another one is to evaluate how many FTEs you can have for support for each productive FTE. Etc... there are many ways to estimate the size of a support team.

Level 1 support doesn't require highly qualified technicians. Nor does level 2 support. Usually you document your product and use level 1, respectively level 2 to buffer questions to minimize the impact on Level 2, respectively level 3. They already use Jira portal so we can hope they use the knowledge base features provided by this tool. If every question directly goes to level 3 (technicians), and if they don't build on top of of past tickets (by opening the knowledge base to the users or by directly improving the documentation) they sure have a problem and their support will never scale up, their most competent technicians will be flooded instead. You don't need many people to run a support team, you need good processes and knowledge management. Then you must be willing to invest in support.

What's sure is that you do not need to sell expensive products to provide a support of decent quality.
So that has to be compensated by lots of sales to people that never report any problem.

Or low production costs. Or low / no support. Or low salaries. Or optimized processes. Or high reuse of production tools. Or a mix.
 
kraal
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Re: Do you get answers from mikrotik support ?

Tue May 03, 2022 11:28 pm

I strongly doubt they're struggling to pay any staff or contractors.
Some facts:
Currently, a support analyst in Latvia is paid up to ~1765 EUR per month, i.e. a salary of 21.2k EUR per year [1].
Knowing that in 2020 Mikrotik's profit per employee was ~260k EUR (82.4M EUR for 316 employees) [2], I also doubt they are struggling to pay them.
As for Mikrotik's CTO, in 2018 he became the richest Latvian with 172M EUR of personal wealth [3].
All this with so called "low cost devices" (which perform well, it's important to highlight it).

A quick calculation shows that 10 additional FTE of Support analyst would cost 212k EUR per year... i.e. 0.26% of Mikrotik's annual profit for 2020.
This should be put in balance by the people who write that low prices mechanicaly imply low support quality.

In this context only fanboys or Mikrotik's shareholders can say that increasing support manforce and quality is not "viable" due to "low prices".
It's a choice part of a set of other (well thought/smart/greedy/younameit) choices which led to profit.
Nobody blames them for having a successfull business. It's business, but it's not a fatality, customers can ask for more, especially from successfull companies.


Sources:
[1] https://www.algas.lv/en/salaryinfo/info ... specialist
[2] https://www.klientuportfelis.lv/lv/jaun ... 6-milj-eur
[3] https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/econ ... t.a294706/

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