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

[thejenbot]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Things that used to work don't work anymore. Things that should work don't, (and let's be honest - some of them never have). There are weird commands going through, or failing, or pending. My logs look like garbage.

We transitioned to cloud hosted so that we could help alleviate some of the workload, and to be fair I'm sure I'd be much more hands-on with these cases if we were still on-prem...but so much time and effort is going into this that everything else is suffering. I haven't had time to come on jamf nation and throw questions out to see if anyone else is dealing with any of the random crap I am, and now it's all snowballed into such a mess that I need to vent and kindly ask for a show of hands.

I sincerely hope that nobody else finds themselves in a similar situation, but if you do - hi! You're not alone! If this is ringing a bell for anyone, please let me know. Or, if you've gone through something like this in the past, please let me know (and hopefully tell me that it will get better).

That's all. Thanks, and have a great day! :)

[tnielsen]

A classic case of sales running the show.

[jrippy]

In response to the original question, I am currently down to 2 or 3 tickets, but yes, I had 8 open not too long ago.
Total, I think I'm over 120 tickets in 5 years.
I love Jamf and the support I get is top notch, but things that ought to work or that were working tend to break between updates.

[MrP]

@jrippy

things that ought to work or that were working tend to break between updates.

I tend to avoid updates unless is has a specific feature or bugfix I need for that exact reason. Every update is like another beta that's not better than the last, just shuffling issues around. Then they go and do things like create a new interface that looks nice on the surface, but once you start using it you realize how half-baked and unpolished it is, all the while leaving hundreds of PI's unaddressed. No one wanted or needed a new interface, and they didn't even do that right.

[scottb]

@MrP - if you're on Jamf's Cloud, you get no choice. They update when they say they're updating, and while I understand it to an extent, I wish the schedule were more flexible - or make me believe that the new update won't break more than it will fix.
When I have a meta-stable environment, and an update busts things, it's a bear.

Of course it's impossible to release new, perfect software, but maybe you could request to be held off of the upgrade schedule until a x.1 comes out or the like. Keeping everyone on the same major release I get, but I'm being pushed more quickly than I feel comfortable with at times...

[david_yenzer]

I've had similar sentiments for a few years now about support quality dropping off. I've mentioned it in a few feedback areas/surveys but never addressed it with anyone specific at Jamf.

It's felt to me like you have to fight through a lower tier of support that is cutting their teeth and learning the ropes - in order to get to the higher tier support that can actually resolve your issues. So if it's not a critical issue a lot of times I won't bother contacting support because it's not worth the frustration. I'll only keep pushing if it's something worth my time of running the gauntlet of newb support.

[devibeck]

We've been a JAMF customer since 2012 and have had a great relationship with JAMF, especially support, until recently. I hope that JAMF is listening and will react to this thread. We are a K-8 school district that made the decision to utilize JAMF because of the level of support they provided. However, the silence from support leads me to believe that JAMF may be moving away from providing support at the level we were used to. We had 1 ticket open created 10/11/18, but the ticket has been suspended? The problem has not been resolved and remains suspended even though I had a face-to-face conversation with my "Customer Success Specialist" who told me that the ticket would be unsuspended and also assured me that I would hear from them by today. The ticket remains suspended and I have received no email from support. So.....I've opened a 2nd ticket requesting information regarding the suspended ticket. Bottom line: I agree that "sales" may be impacting the level of support and not in a good way - especially for education customers who are not profit driven and do not have the ability to adjust by hiring more in-house techs. Dependable (good) support equals happy customers who continue to pay for and use the product as well as recommend it to others.

[simon_brown]

@sam Just to chip in, have also noticed the level of support becoming worse unfortunately. Have had increasing more problems with Jamf Pro 10.x which no one seems to be able to resolve despite being escalated to engineers. Currently have two cases open which haven't heard back for a long time. The previous case I had open was a high priority one as we couldn't access the Jamf web server plus self service wasn't working across the company and support promised would hear back the same day, unfortunately they didn't get back to me. Luckily managed to solve the issue my self however it does not give much confidence. The support used to be fantastic, but nowadays struggle to get any reply. Still waiting for a response for two open cases.

[kahuna]

Thanks for post, am lost, uncertain where to begin. A new installation jamf cloud, maybe where are these composer and other apps i seem to remember from our evelyn wood primer class. I just cannot find and any search in this venue return bupkiss

[sdagley]

@kahuna If your Jamf Nation account is connected to your organization's Jamf account you will find the Jamf Pro software downloads under the My Assets menu item displayed when you click your name in the banner across the top of this page.

[kstrick]

version 10 has been extra buggy. They need to focus more energy on fixing existing bugs before implementing new features. the list of PI's.

[LRZ_Jamf]

Just as a feedback for the community.
Short after our/my post here, jamf reached out to us.
Actually I was surprised that jamf reached out to us within a few hours.
We were asked what our specific issues were, asked about the PIs we are hitting (atm).
And what they could make to have a better life using jamf.

Thats the impression I got from jamf in the beginning (fast reactions!) and that's the way it should go (again in the future). Thanks very much for taking our complaints that serious and keep the ball rolling to change stuff which isn't in your intention aswell.

For all here: I learned: Fill in those feedback forms you get after tickets get closed. (Maybe we will find a way to give Feedback WHILE the case is running aswell in the future)

I'm sure other guys from here got contaced from jamf aswell. And I think if we open this thread and discuss stuff like service quality, we also should mention that jamf did something as an reaction on this.

Cheers and a nice weekend to all of you,
@bofh

[MrP]

They reached out to us as well shortly after my first post, stating "I wanted to see if you had some time to discuss the current Jamf Nation thread and what Jamf can do to improve." My first post stated clearly that my number one complaint with support was that they didn't read what I had written in tickets, and then I gave an example of such. Based on their response, it is clear that once again they didn't read what I wrote. I didn't waste my time replying, re-stating what I already had here. The first step of support's job, which the success of every case depends on, is to listen to the customer and try to clearly understand the issue. The first part of listening when in text form is reading. They aren't doing that.

[thejenbot]

This is a community forum, and I know for a fact (after hearing this from them directly at JNUC) that jamf is definitely aware of what's being said, and they are probably not going to come on here and interject and try to defend themselves, because then we might just clam up and this will all end. I get the sense that they do want to make things better, and everyone has ideas of how to make that happen. I say let's start throwing things out there as feature requests and linking to them on this thread, because it is very visible and is fully on the radar. I will start with my request for a PI Dashboard and another for a Separate Status for Support Cases In Limbo Due to PI. If you agree, please up-vote; then create FRs for how you think things can improve, and let's keep this going to help Make Jamf Great Again!

[mm2270]

@sam, from Jamf, who directs the whole support division in the company already posted here on this thread back on 10/17, so yes, they are actively seeking input from people who are posting their concerns here.
I was also contacted about this and just had our conversation yesterday. @MrP's complaint above notwithstanding, in general it's a good move by Jamf to reach out in this way, and I thank @sam for taking the initiative on this. Even a response to this thread isn't going to be perfect or satisfy everyone, that much is clear, but if they were to do nothing, it would be worse.

On our call, I put in another plug for this Feature Request. It's one of several similar requests, but the one I linked to is considered the "original". I really feel if Jamf can implement something along these lines for paying customers, it would go such a long way toward making the relationship better. We all understand that software development is not easy and frankly, it's impossible for software to NOT have defects. I just think if Jamf could provide better transparency into the product issues they know about or discover after release when working with customers, it would ease the support headaches tremendously. It would also give customers like us, who tend to wait a long time between upgrades to our on-prem Jamf environment, a way to plan out our upgrades better. We would have an idea of what we're getting into, BEFORE we ever pull the trigger. This would be pretty major. I have a feeling we're not alone on that.

If anyone is still planning to have their chat with their customer success specialist or a support person, be sure to mention you would also like to see that kind of system implemented. The more Jamf hears from us how important that is, the more likely they are to put something in place for it. And if you haven't voted up that request or the other similar ones, please do!

[thejenbot]

Screw it, I'm reviving this thing. I'm back up to six cases, and I've got support not listening to me and asking me questions I've already answered. Things seemed to be getting better there for awhile but I'm back to being as frustrated as I was when I started this. I'm sure everyone at jamf will just looooove seeing this pop back up in the feed.

I recently replied with the follow when relaying the same information for the third time in a support case: "if there is something i'm not explaining well, please let me know. actually, i must be doing something wrong because this shouldn't be so hard. this isn't the first time there has been a misunderstanding with support, and as i'm the common denominator, it must be me." But the more I think about it, I don't think so.

I start out with a stream of consciousness and refine things to a point where they should make sense to one speaking the same language. I'm not a noob, and support should be at least on my level. When I read it back it makes sense, and - until I get my case escalated to a higher tier of support - the responses lately have been so off-base that I do a Scooby-Doo style head shake of discombobulation, wondering how on earth they understood what they understood from the typically abundant information I've provided.

I've had conversations with support on how I feel things could be improved, but it doesn't seem to me that my efforts have proved fruitful. Again, hopefully it's just me in this boat, but (as was the case last time - and boy, how) I kinda doubt it. Misery loves company, so if you can relate, please let me know. Otherwise it really is me.

[tnielsen]

I think it's good to show your issues but I also think it would be more helpful to you and the community to break apart the problems into separate posts.

[thejenbot]

i did get a call from support today and there is a plan to get things cleaned up. in past conversations with support, up to and including with the director, i had suggested having some kind of alarm when someone goes over a certain number of cases, and hopefully that will be something we see in the future. as well as the mood of the individual when creating the case - that data is collected and seemingly not utilized. if my mood is getting steadily worse or all of a sudden one pops up and i'm angry, maybe it would warrant someone reaching out. after breakdowns in communication with support recently, the way forward is to have my 5 cases not with tier 4 support all move to one person that can work with me on all of them so we can maximize time. when i have 6 cases with 6 different individuals, one telling me to have logs in debug and another telling me not to, it gets very confusing and frustrating. having a priority list and working with people that listen to me really helps.

[landon_Starr]

Is there just a lack of communication going on behind the scenes? With this upcoming cloud upgrade to 10.10.1, my team has had to reach out to 3 different folks just to try and confirm start times and outage estimates.

I know things are busy, but I'd think basic stuff like this would be common knowledge among the support teams.

[RLR]

I eventually got escalated to what I guess is 3rd line. She is very helpful and knowledgeable and answers questions not specifically related to the ticket. We're slowly making progress on our JSS and getting rid of errors in the logs. The only issue I have is that she is 6 hours behind our timezone so we generally only get one email a day. I'm glad something is now being done and we have already sorted a few errors out.

There defiantly seems to be a lot of Product Issues. These are stopping some things working how we want them to work or we can't use them at all.

[prl]

@landon_Starr the upgrade time was in the email they sent us, check your spam. @RLR ask for your case to be transferred to someone in your timezone unless you enjoy working with that person. Sharing things I've learned from using Jamf heavily for three years. There are not product issues in my environment atm, but yay for IT we're all unique!

[JohnM007]

@thejenbot you are not alone ! I'm getting crazy since the 5 last months...

The support is the worst support ever, they don't know and they don't understand their proper product !

Jamf is getting worst every time we upgrade it. Our Smart Groups are populated randomly, Extension Attributes value changes without asking (causing Smart Groups populate), apps don't uninstall on iPads when removed from scope....

Jamf solution ? Pay for support. (If not, you will need to explain your problem to 4 or 5 different people and the problem is never solved)

My solution ? I'm looking for another MDM.

Have a good day

[tomt]

Stumbled across this thread while searching for an answer. I just switched the cloud to be our primary DP and uploaded the first package directly to the cloud DP using Jamf Admin. It was a pretty big package (Xcode 10.2.1) and now I am sitting here in "Availability Pending" hell.

Is this normal behavior when using Cloud as primary? Am I just spoiled from being used to instant availability from a normal file share DP? Am I screwed and need to get my company to dump the cloud and go fully on-prem to get something that works reliably?

Signed,
ThisIsNotHowIPlannedToSpendMyFridayNight

[patgmac]

@tomt they don’t support using Jamf Admin with a cloud DP. You have to use the web interface, then you can sync with Jamf Admin to your other DPs.

[diradmin]

@patgmac Where is this "limitation" with JAMF Admin and JCDS documented / referenced?

[patgmac]

@diradmin PI-004101
https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/my/products/known-issues

[thejenbot]

of course there is a PI for that. there is a PI for everything.

i called support this morning and got a resolution to one problem, only to have three new questions pop up. i'm running into issues left and right and have no time to go down the rabbit hole in search of answers. every time i try something, i'm opening a new can of worms.

i should start vermicomposting at this point; i could sell that black gold and maybe get a job where i don't have to deal with this crap all the time. haha, get it? crap? vermicomposting? (hopefully that made at least one person chuckle...)

i would like the record to show that i did not revive this thread, and i had honestly not planned to; but now that it's back, i will mention that i'm still dealing with a lot of the same stuff. it's just a different day...

[diradmin]

@patgmac Thank you!

[JFGraphia]

I love this dialog! Let me tell you the worst, most embarrassing JAMF support story in the history of their Cloud garbage.

1. Open ticket with support stating "When trying to access the admin UI we see the Under Construction page". Please look in to the issue and let us know.

2. Response from JAMF Support "Have we tried restarting Tomcat?"

3. Reply to Jamf Support "Dear Support, please hand over the AWS keys to the cloud instance and I will happily restart ALL of it."

4. Case immediately closed

5. 2hrs later group email received stating in 3-5 days(weekend maintenance window) our instance would be restarted. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Let us point out how awful their support is:
1. The rep put forth no effort to even identify what type of customer we were: On Prem, Cloud or Magical Inter-dimensional Portal setup
2. He threw back the generic stupid response of "restart Tomcat" will fix EVERYTHING. 3. The case was immediately closed to avoid showing how poorly trained /unconcerned their tier 0.1 people are
4. Instead of alerting ALL customers of the shared tenant and treating this as a P1 they just sent a dumb email and waited 4 days to restart it.

Super Professional work and worth every penny...

[Robert_Giordano]

OH, JAMF "support" is ridiculous! They just throw things at the wall when trying to figure out an issue, ultimately they will stop answering and move on, then just close the support case?! Worthless. OK, frustrations quelled..The support is less than I would hope for but I do understand the JAMF side- Apple can make management difficult. And there are some very good engineers at JAMF, Kyle Yohnk is one of them. He is not afraid to get at the issue and will make sure you are happy with the process. Still working on it but with someone who accepts the challenges and is determined.

[Lucasder]

I currently have at least one PI open. My bigger issue is with the support itself, and I​ have voiced it to my open tickets each time. It seems if you don't pay the extra for pro services I only get one response a day.
Open a ticket with a ton of info, they respond with something to try. When I complete it right away and message back I do not hear from anyone until the next day and its again a single response until the next day no matter what the offered solution is. It is frustrating and causes long delays.

[Hugonaut]

wow...lots of negative reviews

I've got no issue at all, we don't have premium - just standard Jamf Pro Licensing & On Prem. Basic Level Support & Support has always been quick to respond & provide a great deal of help. Never had an issue!

[larry_barrett]

same as @Hugonaut . Always works.

[krausec]

I am going to put my two cents in here. I will admit that several times some of the support I have received has not been up to par. But, then there are days like today, that I spend 2.5 hours on the phone with John and he did everything he could, even eliciting help from co-workers, to at least get my Jamf server and DEP talking again. In any company, you have the great workers, good workers, and well then the rest. Not all of Jamf support is bad, please be thankful for the ones that do get the job done. By the way I put my request in yesterday.

[donmontalvo]

Been using Jamf Pro (was Casper) since 2009, always had a premiere support contract for quick responses and tight SLAs.

The number of open tickets, product issues, etc., can be attributed to Apple's rapidly changing macOS platform.

The more Apple changes, the more Jamf has to hunker down and retool...gotta give 'em credit for where they are now.

Just my 2¢.

[cbrewer]

I found myself reminiscing about this post today. For me, Jamf Pro itself was better reliability/bug wise in 2019. However, I've also found myself missing the high quality of support that I commented on in this very post in 2018. It used to be that Jamf technical account managers seemed to have tight connections with product development and engineers. I am sure this is a by-product of growth but I have found it much more difficult to get useful information from support in 2019 and now early 2020. As frustrating as software bugs are it really helped ease the pain when Jamf Support was going the extra mile to get me real-time info on where an issue was at with the engineering side of the house. Lately, all I get is "we have no news to share at this time" and "we can close this case out to the product issue so you'll get future updates". Maybe we complained too much about having multiple support cases open because support seems very quick to close out support cases with no real resolution these days. Sadly, I have a feeling that my beloved 2018 level of premium support will forever be a fond memory.

[tomt]

As they get bigger and add more and more "Professional Managers", the only thing that matters are Metrics that can be shown on an Excel sheet. I see it all the time when companies become more about process than actually resolving issues. The buck gets passed around for a while until it finally reaches one of the old-school engineers who will get it fixed.

[scottb]

Piggybacking on @donmontalvo 's thoughts, yeah, back then literally nobody gave a rat's arse about Macs except Mac users and Jamf. We had nothing but ARD to do anything resembling remote/automated support for Macs.

Today, Apple has changed, security needs have changed, and the workload on Mac admins is growing like mad.
The whole ecosystem of Apple has changed dramatically since and now we have Macs and iOS/iPadOS/tvOS devices all over corporate America. Things have changed and the tools will be playing catch-up for a while I suppose.

My only lament really is that is seemed like it used to be more fun to be a Mac guy/gal back then. Jamf are in fact working hard with folks in the beta programs and if you haven't done so, you might want to consider joining in on that...

[#39]

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