[AusNOG] Primus BGP support

[Campbell, Alex]

Thanks for the reply Skeeve.

 

I agree it's not reasonable to expect the NOClings to be able to
troubleshoot BGP issues, but they need to be able to recognise these
issues and know where/how to escalate them to someone who can.

 

18 hours since we first reported the problem and I still haven't been
able to get anyone from Primus to fix this issue.  Even AAPT would have
sorted this by now.  I've got on to our account manager but this doesn't
seem to be helping.

 

Does anyone have a clueful contact at Primus who might be able to help
tonight?  It appears the problems are configuration issues at their end
so it is going to need someone who has enable on their routers.

 

Cheers,

 

Alex

 

 

From: Skeeve Stevens [mailto:skeeve at skeeve.org] 
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 1:54 AM
To: Campbell, Alex; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: RE: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

 

Their response is certainly not reasonable.... But you will find it the
case a lot of the time.

 

I've had BGP issues with several carriers on the weekends and late at
night, and it has always been a nightmare getting them to escalate to
someone who has a clue with BGP to look at the issues.... Most of the
time the 'NOC' staff don't even know what BGP is much less able to fix
it.

 

It is probably too much to expect the people answering the phones to be
know BGP, but they should understand the concepts of their network, and
they should be able to escalate the ticket to someone who actually knows
what to do - or who to call.  I find that 'hyping' the outage in these
cases helps... tell them it is a critical outage involving some large
number, or important end customer or some such...  works most of the
time.  When that fails I ask for their escalation contacts and start
calling account managers mobiles and other people I can annoy who know
how to else to annoy.

 

Does your contract talk about their SLA's?  I find that most SLA's are
severely lacking and rarely detail their NOC's response and actions. 

 

If the sales guy said that then there has been a breach of verbal
contract - but you'd have fun fighting that.  Go up the line.... Not
that it helps sometimes... try talking to Soul... they're TPG's bitch
now and barely have any ability to get things done with their upstream
network.  Last BGP issue I had with Soul took a huge effort by the Soul
people to get the TPG phone monkey to even wake up the on-call engineer
- and that took hours.  Soul sales guys have been nice, but in the end,
it's a signed deal and they don't really care that much - but Soul has
been like that for a while.... I think they sold theirs......  a long
time ago ;-)

 

With Primus... I'd pressure them... raise it as an outage... if you
aren't getting the right feed or something like that, then I would
consider it an outage, as these kinds of things can have cost
implications as well as cause degraded services.  Demand they escalate -
get as high as you can and anyone who won't help you, escalate again if
possible and remind them they are in breach of their support
agreements... usually works.  Then talk to the sales people and get the
situation fixed if you can... otherwise, buy elsewhere and let everyone
know how you were treated.  If Soul only knew how many hundreds of
thousands (if not millions) of dollars of revenue and flow on business
they have lost because of their extremely slack technical and sales
support.

 

...Skeeve

 

 

--

Skeeve Stevens, CEO

eintellego Pty Ltd - The Networking Specialists

skeeve at eintellego.net / www.eintellego.net

Phone: (+61) 1300 753 383, Fax: (+612) 8572 9954

Cell +61 (0)414 753 383 / skype://skeeve

--

NOC, NOC, who's there?

 

 

 

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Campbell, Alex
Sent: Saturday, 1 November 2008 11:39 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

 

Hi all,

 

We have recently started buying transit from Primus in their Melbourne
DC.  We have come across a BGP issue with their service and their NOC is
telling us that they only do BGP support 9am-5pm Monday-Friday.  I guess
they figure that BGP issues are very friendly and usually only arise
during business hours.

 

This is especially frustrating since I actually asked their business
development manager during the sales process "does Primus have a 24x7
NOC we can contact, staffed by engineers capable of troubleshooting BGP
issues etc" and he said yes.

 

Has anyone else had similar experiences with Primus?  Does this seem
reasonable?

 

Cheers,

 

Alex 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20081102/78df6a0e/attachment.html>