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A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

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Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#11
post #6

" I find that 2147481343 seems to do the trick. This number doesn't make any sense to me. I suggest the customer try this number. The customer replies back: it works with google.com, but it does not work with other domains." My extrapolation: I find a potential fix: don't test it, don't understand it, and send it to customer. How is this acceptable?

Your extrapolation is incorrect. The following description matches the factual components of what you see as unacceptable, but includes the missing context from the post that makes the engineer's actions acceptable rather than unacceptable:

It was sent to the customer to collect experimental results while investigation continued in parallel. Per the post, production mitigations had already been put into place, and the customer was knowingly participating in an investigation of an unknown issue. The customer provided the requested experimental results.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#12
post #4

that’s a pretty good and detailed explanation. 2 things: 1) i hope they have a runbook for situations like this (ie the support engineer does not have to figure all this on the fly) 2) the customer should have provides more details and maybe should have thought of the tweaks they made (classic solution is to compare 2 instances - one works one does not)

You can't runbook these sort of issues... You can ensure you have the knowledge and tools to root cause the problem.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#15

> After another spin around the world the case comes back to our team. So basically, follow the sun doesn't work for hard problems? Can you really say the people are working on this 24/7 if progress is only made in one time zone?

I suspect the author was in the same timezone as the customer. Not all customers will have follow the sun coverage. The customer had also mitigated the problem for the time being.

It does show that embracing good change management techniques is important. The VM in question clearly had runtime configs updated manually or other VMs would have exhibited the same problem. Ideally orgs should be able to identify when the change was introduced and the rationale / tests that were used.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#16
post #13

Is Google Cloud support this good in general, or only for certain tiers or plans?

The front-line support is the same as anywhere else. But Google Cloud has really really good second and third line support, if the first tier can't figure it out. And in many cases, it'll get escalated directly to the implementing engineers.

In my experience, Google Cloud is better than most organizations about escalating hard issues up to the chain. Admittedly, this happened at a company with substantial spend, and I can't say one way or another whether a smaller player would get the same quality of support.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#17
Google support is basically non existent for customers even spending like 5-10K a month on their platform.

Even questions you raise on their Reddit sub go unnoticed.

They don't have bunch of people actively trying to solve their customers problem.

That said the only time my problems were actually listed to were from BigQuery team. Other than this, I don't think it's possible to get any explanation on a feature from any other product team at Google cloud.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#19
post #6

" I find that 2147481343 seems to do the trick. This number doesn't make any sense to me. I suggest the customer try this number. The customer replies back: it works with google.com, but it does not work with other domains." My extrapolation: I find a potential fix: don't test it, don't understand it, and send it to customer. How is this acceptable?

I don't think they were pitching it as a solution, instead a "try this and see if it works", which helps continue the debugging.

It can also help because it shows the customer you're making progress.

Re: A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

#20
post #17

Google support is basically non existent for customers even spending like 5-10K a month on their platform. Even questions you raise on their Reddit sub go unnoticed. They don't have bunch of people actively trying to solve their customers problem. That said the only time my problems were actually listed to were from BigQuery team. Other than this, I don't think it's possible to get any explanation on a feature from a…

We spent orders of magnitude of that and they still treated us poorly. The silver lining is that they at least don't discriminate based on the spend.
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