Am I the only person that has 8 open cases with jamf support?

We see exactly the same thing with our UNC Wide cloud instance.

Its a game of let's see what will fail for no apparent reason today. Its maddening some days to unravel the whys and whats of the issues.

I hope to get together some like minded folks next week at JNUC and see if we can collectively get things improved with JAMF

Snook

I get frustrated when the tech people don't listen to me when I am telling them what's wrong. I wish I could go next week. I have list of things to change.

We are seeing the same issues.

Me, when calling Jamf Support:

I don't think I have had 8 total tickets opened, if you exclude beta program and upgrade my server tickets the whole 10 years I have been using Jamf products. Don't get me wrong, Jamf isn't perfect. I have had more than 8 issues, it just that support has helped me resolve the issue every time or provided a work around...many times the work around was better than my original way of doing what I was trying to do.

C

PS I have a ticket open now for a issue that support found when we troubleshooting an issue I created, and that issue doesn't even effect us. That is a super star support team and organization. It's the only open ticket that I can remember for our cloud hosted instance in about 3 years.

PSS... While I am 100% sure there are many issues with Jamf Pro, I am wondering if we are not all a little spoiled? In comparison to other software I have to interact with Jamf Pro has the least issues by far... we have left other MDM vendors and don't get me started with Apple......it's clear by any measure Jamf Pro is better software than the past few current versions of the macOS.

This post plus this other post has kinda got me a little worried and thinking about how we all view Jamf. While I am sort of ok with with people posting negative stuff on specific issues, I am sure that it's not good for everyone if we just generally post negatively. We have to all remember that this day and age if you say somthing enough times poeple take it to be a fact.

I also understand that the work we do it's very easy to "vent" without thinking about the all the consequences, my team would be rich if they got paid by the number times I blurt out I am going to email Tim Cook.

end soapbox

I have been a JAMF user since version 4 (yes Composer for ARD 4 way in 2006) Zach H. was my SE, Wudi did our jumpstart. I love JAMF and still do, I want to see them succeed. I have been carrying the banner for many years.

But the QA and issues we are seeing lately have been the worst in years. Granted we have over 18K clients and I'd argue more policies and smart groups than most instances. We are one cloud instances with many sites for the entire UNC system. And we are very big on bug reporting and making this product better through client/vendor collaboration so our ticket count might be elevated due to that. And I will say our support has always been good from a customer service POV but we have run into a lot of "never seen that issue before" problems lately.

Here is just a sample of the issues on our last 30 day report:

Product Issues Associated to Appalachian State University

PI-006187 Jamf Remote - MBS Xojo Plugins fail on 10.6.2
PI-002379 macOS User Level MDM Commands may be queued after user logs out
PI-005569 Jamf.apps timing out after upgrading to 10.2.x when sites are involved with larger sets of computers/computer groups
PI-005048 Apps - App Updates - Automatic Update Sends all Updates at Once - Can Cause JPS Crashes
PI-005315 (PI-005315) Slow SQL Query on patches.html Causes Page Load to Slow or Fail
PI-003299 Icons - Duplicate images stored in Database
PI-004990 (PI-004990) Patch Management - Version Numbers Not in Order
PI-005007 Multiple New Patch Policy Objects write with latest Opened Temporary Objects Definition Parent
PI-004686 (PI-004686) Results added to scope target view via a filtered search have blank 'Add' buttons
PI-004505 Policy Logs for deleted Policies move to Remote Logs
PI-000524 Can't reset management password if the password stored in the JSS is wrong
PI-003969 (PI-003969) Modifying Users and Groups > LDAP Group Name Breaks Connection
PI-002998 Patch reporting causes threads and connections to max out, especially in large environments
PI-000857 (PI-000857) Configuration profiles may install outside of site scope
PI-005548 JCDS File Uploads Can Get Stuck in "Availability Pending", Eventually "Upload Failed"
PI-004101 Casper Admin may fail to upload and replicate large packages to JCDS or Cloud Distribution points
PI-002379 macOS User Level MDM Commands may be queued after user logs out
PI-005048 Apps - App Updates - Automatic Update Sends all Updates at Once - Can Cause JPS Crashes
PI-003515 If a policy doesn't complete gracefully, future occurrences of the policy will not be advertised to the client upon check-in within an hour
PI-004473 (PI-004473) DEP enrollment - Prestage Enrollments | Accounts Payload: Skip Account Creation is not respected.
PI-002765 Device records not fully deleted if device checks in while being deleted.
PI-002269 Policies intermittently fail to be triggered by Loginhook
PI-002745 (PI-002745) ASM - Shared iPad - Configuration Profiles - Web Clips Payload - Web Clips Fail when Deployed to Shared iPads at the Device Level
PI-006109 Macs with T2 chip reporting as "FileVault Enabled" out of box.

I share a similar concern, having seen Jamf's support offering change over the years. I understand that they're growing as a company and need to standardize how they handle support cases, but I find that it is now rarely productive to contact support except to find out which PI we need to look for in future patch notes.

It is doubly frustrating when I see what kind of support we get elsewhere. We had an issue with some certificates on our CrashPlan servers (which ended up being a problem with how Venafi built the JKS, so nothing even caused by their product), and their engineer still spent 2 hours on the phone with me troubleshooting.
By comparison, my last experience with Jamf support was an engineer who scheduled a troubleshooting session more than a week away, didn't show up to it, and then closed the case with a note that my workaround was good enough as a fix.

To all contributing and/or in agreement with this thread, the question is now how do we make our voices heard by Jamf?

I've reached out to my CSS on multiple occasions, and in each instance they seem to feel the same level of frustration as myself. In one instance, they actually lashed out at me (the customer) for pointing out the multiple issues we encountered during a major upgrade and went so far as to state that it was my fault as we did not opt in for their "premium" support.

I'm reluctant to bring anything further to their attention, and am in the same situation as @bvrooman , as escalating to Jamf Support has now become more of a formality and for the purpose of identifying a PI, with little to no expectation as to the actual resolution of the issue at hand.

I've had a few conversations with the account rep who covers the region our parent company is in (unfortunately I don't believe I've even met the person who covers our actual region), and the recommendation has been the same every time: pay for premium support and things might be better.

A few weeks ago we had a JAMF support call for multiple issues with our JSS system. All of them turned out to be existing PIs that have not been fixed yet. JAMF said that our 'next, best thing' we can do is load balance our whole setup. However, they don't provide much help for that and all the issues were PI anyways. Very frustrating.

@snook if you get anywhere with PI-006109 id be grateful of an update - im getting frustrated with this problem and need to get it logged with JAMF support myself, have had a discussion on here with people about it so hopefully enough people have mentioned it that they are fixing it

So @snook and I are on the same instance and we DO pay for premium support. The issue is not with Support but instead with product Quality Assurance. Recent releases have been "death by 10,000 paper cuts". Witness the quick release of x.1's over the 10.x series. Yes this is still the best macOS management tool available but we want to make it much better.

The reason I have so many cases open is that I, too, want to make the product better - and just by creating this discussion I did make my voice heard. I got an email from my CSS and he literally typed out "no, you're not the only person that has 8 support cases open". He called and we had a good chat and now have a plan to get over this hurdle.

It is overwhelming at times but overall I don't think things would be any better elsewhere. At least here we have this great community that can feel free to post - and feel free to get on a soapbox and disagree with the way that I went about this. If we weren't in the middle of a massive warranty issue with our iPads I would have more time to get on here and create individual threads for all of the issues to see if others are experiencing the same thing, but this is the best I can do for the time being.

As @snook says we constantly hear "I've never seen that before" - not just from jamf and Apple, but from other vendors as well - frankly we're getting sick of it. Why we're so lucky I'll never know.

I will be at JNUC this year for the first time (probably rocking my favorite green ninja turtles sweatshirt if you want to say hi!) and am really looking forward to talking with people to see what I can do better and how we can work together to improve as a whole. I really appreciate the comments from everyone - at the very least it's good to know I'm not alone! :)

@thejenbot email me snookkd at appstate dot edu (and anyone else planning to go to JNUC). Lets plan a meet up to talk about all our PIs and moving forward with JAMF support. I'm not cool enough to rock the TMNT hoodie but if you ask enough people, "Have you seen Snook?" you'll find me easy enough

What is tough here is that we have an internal push to go to AirWatch, and I'm fighting for the life of Jamf as our offering.
When I have basic things like enrollment URL/QuickAdd not working as needed, and others that have gone on for far too long, I will get asked why am I still insisting on Jamf?

I think people are venting after a lonnnnng time here, not just a guy/gal who has their first issue ranting about how much Jamf sucks.
It's a sign that Jamf needs to read about and act. Growing pains are normal, and we all know that if tech worked as well as it's sold to, half of us would be out of work. I just want the tools I use to work and that issues don't drag through version after version, leaving me dry.

Still love Jamf, but I see the need to tighten things up as well. Like many others, I don't get any budget for JNUC or the like :(

Funny, I have an open ticket waiting on a response I literally had to put in the ticket... "Is anyone monitoring this ticket?" to try and get someones attention. Still waiting.....

I agree with almost all the comments that have been posted in this thread so far. We are challenged by a lingering number of defects that never seem to get fixed plus almost every new release seems to introduce more defects that affect us (a single private High School with about 2000 devices) than are resolved.

A few months ago I initiated some discussion with JAMF support leadership and expressed my concern that 2018 was looking like 2013-14 was. That is JAMF product quality was becoming an issue as the company was continuing to grow quickly and add more functionality.

FYI we jumped from JAMF to AirWatch in 2014 in frustration about the product defects at that time. It proved to be a big mistake for us!

I would like to call for a freeze on adding new functionality and a focus on product quality for Jamf Pro for a while please.

I hate to jump on this bandwagon as I know that writing software in general is a difficult task - especially something as complex as Jamf Pro. That said, version 10 hasn't been a good experience so far. Every dot release has been a trade off of resolving an issue or 2 and then dealing with 2 or 3 new ones. We've been with Jamf since version 5 I believe. I think they had about 30 employees when we first chose Casper over LanRev. @nick helped get us going. While it's still an extremely valuable tool for us, the high number of product issues requires constant attention and troubleshooting. We recently spent the better part of a week dealing with a major issue that ultimately was out of our hands. It was a new PI introduced in 10.7. Without a seasoned Jamf admin and Jamf's excellent (usually) support, it would be difficult to be successful with their product IMHO.

Our district has been with JAMF/Casper for more than 10 years, and this post really resonated with me. When we started using JAMF, it was by far the best product our district had ever purchased, and the support we received from JAMF was second to none.

For the past few years, I feel we have spent more time troubleshooting JAMF than JAMF has saved us managing devices.

Lately we have been experiencing a host of issues. Policies just not triggering for any apparent reason, performance issues, software update issues, user-level-mdm issues, just heaps and heaps of seemingly inexplicable behaviors. @ega put it well — “death by 10,000 … cuts”.

This summer I moved from on-prem to cloud hosted after several discussion with JAMF engineers reassuring me that performance would not be an issue. We even started over from scratch with a clean install to avoid bring over years of cruft. Guess what? Performance has been an issue. A serious issue. (I keep getting the This Service is Temporarily Unavailable time-out when performing mass actions, and the UI is sporadically slow). My last Support Ticket was resolved by: “Your workaround will be to do mass actions in smaller batches.” By the way, by smaller batches, JAMF means less than 150 devices. Isn't this an MDM? Isn't it built to do mass actions? If I wanted to do small batches of devices at a time, and constantly monitor the states of the commands I send, and then resend the commands for the devices that fail, I could use Apple Remote Desktop and Configurator.

Just this week (its only Wednesday morning), we have encountered:
trying to install iWork updates, computers are getting the command "Install App - Pages" (or Numbers, or Keynote) but nothing actually happens
performance issues with JAMF Cloud instance that require me to limit actions to no more than 150 devices at a time

In general, support is not as good as it has been (ever since they removed the dedicated, account-assigned support staff really), I could go on about that, but the fundamental issue here has just been product reliability. I have had to create a Google Spreadsheet shared with the department that tracks PI's.

Lately JAMF just doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Period.

PS - and it is getting really frustrating, and I hate that, because re-read my first sentence.

I can sadly chime in and corroborate the issues being discussed here. While I don't use support much, the last couple of times I have used it, it's been very lackluster and disappointing. I won't mention any specific issues or names, but I had contacted support several months back about a problem that was perplexing me, something that wasn't working anymore, which I know for a fact used to work in a previous release. When I initially spoke to the support person, they weren't even aware that the product was supposed to do this specific function. I had to give them a detailed description of how it was supposed to work and they came back and said, I was right and they were mistaken. Not very promising so far. Then the support call I had to troubleshoot the issue turned into essentially one big shoulder shrug. They had no idea why it wasn't working, didn't offer to do anything but the most rudimentary troubleshooting on their end, and in the end could only suggest I use a workaround - one that I came up with myself and mentioned and not an actual suggestion from them.
I almost felt like I was supporting them instead of them supporting me. I wish I could say it was the only experience where I felt like that, but it's not. It seems like support and knowledge of the product and how to actually fix stuff, at least with the general support techs, has taken a real nose dive in the last couple of years. I'm certain there are still some very sharp folks at Jamf, but I'm really wondering if they have much influence these days in the direction of the product or how support functions. It sure doesn't seem like it.

I still love Jamf, and their product is still great in many respects, but at the rate things are going, I find myself having trouble enthusiastically recommending them to people I encounter in my job. There are competing products, some that are decent and some not. But eventually Jamf will get booted from the top spot in this management space unless they take control of the situation and get these PIs and support issues straightened out. I hope someone there is paying attention.

It would be great to have a Jamf chime in here at some point to perhaps provide some insight and reassurance.

For the past few years, I feel we have spent more time troubleshooting JAMF than JAMF has saved us managing devices.

Yes. jamf needs to step up their QA quite a bit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but sounds like the landslide of issues happened with version 10 and up?

We are still on JSS 9.101.4-t1507816971. I'm holding my breath, but eventually, we'll have to jump to JSS 10.

@mvu

IMHO, somewhat.

I think a bigger issue is the overall architecture of has issues too. Performance, even when everything seems to be working, can be very slow. Not sure if it is just Tomcat or the fact that this is a Java app.

I also wanted to point something else out as well,

We have talked to other MDMs who have called Apple's MDM "Cloud" the "Triangle of Death": MDM>client Device>Apple Cloud. I wonder how much performance and PIs issues originate with Apple.

@mvu Version 9.x has it's own share of issues, but from what I can tell, v10 has had more of them, and more frequently it seems. I'm still on 9.99, but like you, the org has to move to v10 since we can't move ahead with full support for High Sierra, and certainly no support for Mojave unless we do that. I'm dreading moving to version 10, since I haven't seen it overall as a good thing. My experience with it has been that the UI is very sluggish and continues to be that way, even with a relatively mature 10.7x. But I think you have a point that the quality has gone down since 10 was released.