A rant of the first order...

[BradSp]

Meraki, we need to talk. It's not me, it's you.

I won't use the word 'frequently', but often enough over the past year to not be surprising the next time it happens, I've seen the same pattern: a portion of the Dashboard (be it Air Marshall or Client details or Traffic Analytics) is missing data (and will show the exact words 'No Data') for a time period between 12 hours to a couple days, I put in a Ticket *with screenshots*, only to receive a delayed 1st Level response of either 'it looks good on our end' or (and this seems to be their favorite, when it's available to them) 'you can expect lower traffic on the weekend / off hours'. Folks, '0' is quite different from 'lower'. Zero is zip, nada, zilch. NO DATA. As it showed in my screenshot. That I attached to the Ticket. And you apparently ignored.

Now, here's the kicker, and what I think has been happening repeatedly. The last occurrence spanned a long enough time frame that refreshes of the Traffic Analytics page showed the data being loaded back in. I could watch the charts and graphs backfilling and catching up. This leads me to a troubling conclusion; you've got issues on your backend that either hold up or lose user data that you need to reload or restore, and you're using your Support as a delaying action while you scramble in the background. Either you've got Support dragging their feet while you work behind the curtain, or you're not telling them what they need to know to give honest help and are using their ignorance as a shield. Neither situation is confidence inspiring, and it begs the question: how long until you have a data disruption or loss you can not recover? Thanks for tonight's reason to drink.

As is my nature, I'll give you yet another chance. But please, get some help. Counseling, therapy, better infrastructure, more informed 1st Levels...something. Give me honesty about what's going on when you're feeling down, *and what you're doing to better yourself*. I'll understand. And trust me, I'll feel a lot better about 'us' than what you're giving me now makes me feel.

[RWelch]

Doesn't sound as if you had a pleasant support case experience which is unfortunate.  The Dashboard has a GIVE YOUR FEEDBACK button in the lower RH corner if you haven't yet used that or are unaware of this feature.  

Additionally, at the conclusion of your support case, you are typically given the option of providing feedback.  

Although this doesn't fix the experience you described above, there are ways or means articulating back your support experience.

Meraki Status tends to provide awareness to problematic things impacting a large number of customers.

[RWelch]

Perhaps this might be an option for you as well.

Call me now is a new customer support feature on the Meraki Dashboard that allows you to get help from Meraki Support in a faster and more efficient way. With this feature, you have the ability to request an immediate call from Meraki Support directly through the dashboard. 

Call Me Now 

[GiacomoS]

Hello @BradSp , 

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and feedback here, and I am truly sorry about the poor experience with those cases. 

If you can please share the case numbers in a direct message, I can make sure I follow up with the appropriate leaders and engineers, so we can provide coaching and make sure we improve this for everyone.

Regarding the technical issue itself, from what you have described and without having too much additional context, it sounds to me like it may be delays in the various pages of Dashboard loading the data from the respective databases, possibly due to server load at a particular moment of the day. As you mentioned, refreshing may eventually get the data loaded up, which is potentially part of the reason why Support doesn't see the issue by the time the case gets delivered to the engineer. 

That said, I think we can do better with providing context on what we observe or what you are experiencing, and I'll make sure to pass the feedback on to our leaders. 

Dashboard is a massive and complex beast, and as in all IT operations, the increase in feature set also boosts the demand for resources. Our infrastructure teams have in depth monitoring to catch these kind of situations early on, and most times they tend to address them before both Support and customers have an opportunity to notice, but at times the resolution requires a bit more time and that's when the concurrency of you encountering it versus our internal teams coordinating happens. Unfortunately, those end up being the circumstances with the most frustrating disservices, and I understand that can throw a spanner in the work of your day to day operations. 

As Support encounters more such reports, we ordinarily start to observe the patterns and we eventually reconciliate the reports with what the infrastructure team is investigating, and we can eventually provide a more comprehensive response on what is happening. 

I appreciate that we have an opportunity to do much better with our communication, and I'll take your feedback internally to the other teams involved as well. 

Hopefully this helps provide some context, but should you have any other feedback or concern, please don't hesitate to let me know, also via direct message. 

Thank you again for your patience, and your continued faith!

Giac