Forum Discussion
MS Professional support for Defender ATP is nonexistent
TJ Cornish I feel your pain. In the last few months, I've had a few "Professional" MS Support cases open to the tune of $499 a pop and they've all turned out to be a joke. The experience is anything but professional. Fortunately(?), it's not just Defender ATP where this backlog exists, it's "Professional" support across all of their products as far as I can tell. My most recent Defender ATP support case was opened on 4/3 with Severity A (expected response 2 hours) and after multiple followup calls initiated on my end, I finally heard from Microsoft on 4/16. It's also impossible to really chase anyone down since the don't let (or claim not to let) the individuals opening the cases have any direct contact with the teams providing support. It's now 5/6, and this case still had no real movement. They haven't even verified that the issue is reproducible even though it 100% is (e.g. Chrome win32k SysCalls being blocked regardless of any mitigation rule exceptions).
You may not know this depending on your organization's size, but there is a level of support above "Professional" which doesn't operate on a pay-per-incident (PPI) basis, but rather bills hourly. This is the only level that Microsoft very clearly takes seriously and it is known as Premier support. However, if you're a smaller organization, you literally cannot access this level of support without going through a third-party that has a contract with Microsoft. Then you get the luxury of paying the third-party their hourly rate to manage the case as well as hourly rates to Microsoft for their work on the case, but at least you will finally be dealing with a responsive individual.
Anyway, you're not alone in your support struggles. It's infuriating. If it's any consolation, you can typically get your $499 refunded when these cases go nowhere.
simcpkThanks for your commiseration. I have attempted 3 $499 Pro support calls in the last 90 days. The first I ended up solving myself before the agent got back to me. They claim they have refunded it, but I haven't gotten the refund. Case number 2 is pushing a month old, now, too. I have had engineer contact, but no final resolution; last step is for them to actually call me and implement the rest of the remediation. Case number 3 is the above. I'm not sure if my complaint post here triggered action or if it was coincidental, but I did finally receive a call back on Friday, the day after I posted this.
Thanks for the tip on "Premier" support. As you suspected, we are a small shop and can't get it at any price. We have tried with Skype For Business Online and utterly failed.
The level of chaos in the MS world right now is unsustainable. Products are materially and obviously broken and support is nearly non-existent. Cloud service uptime (e.g. the DNS issue last week that took down all of Office365) is far worse than the on-prem world, and MS apparently can't manage any kind of testing - the root issue for nearly every service issue in Azure/O365 is bad code and/or an admin screwup.
What a great time to be in Technology.
TJ Cornish My company has "unified support", which is a percentage of our annual Microsoft spend that's not insubstantial. We just got it with our new EA in June. I opened a ticket the 6th. I didn't hear back until the evening of the 12th when my TAM set the case to Severity A. Once I heard back and responded on the 13th, it was set back to B. I haven't had a response since. One response in coming up on two weeks for around a six figure yearly sticker price. At this point, I wouldn't recommend anybody pay the money. Luckily we are only committed for the first year of our EA. I have a much better experience with on-demand services contracts from MS Partners at less than 1/10th the cost.
I'm convinced the root issue is the ridiculous churn at MS now - software changes twice a week and not even MS knows what the heck their software does, let alone the poor outsourcing contractors that are supposed to help us hapless end users. Until MS figures out that "agile" development cycles that are too fast to allow for any testing or user input aren't a good thing, the misery will continue.
Azure has been unbelievably underwhelming for us. When you factor in the double billing of backup/replication and storage costs, it's way more expensive than on-prem infrastructure, and you find yourself making performance concessions to run on cheap servers that aren't up to the task.
There are some cool things - Azure ATP being potentially one of them, but MS needs to find a balance between new/cool stuff and actually architecting things well-enough the first time that they don't need to replace 30% of the code in every system every month.
