Synology Support (web) is a highway to hell

Currently reading
Synology Support (web) is a highway to hell

2,486
840
NAS
Synology, TrueNAS
Operating system
  1. Linux
  2. Windows
This long shot isn't for lazy.
Smart people will get info, how to create tickets and how to be durable.
Finally, it is not about hating, because in the last part there is a consideration - how to do it better.

When we imagine that the number of current Syno NASes may be at the level of 6M (Syno has not published data since 2018).
When the ratio of NAS beginners is at the level of 80% (main Syno target), because Pareto principle and data from Shodan, we talk about 4.8M users who need constant help.
They often end up somewhere on portals like the official Syno community or in Synoforum.com (advanced level). However, many end up in official support through Synology.com.

So you can imagine how the 1st level support must be set up, for what kind of questions. Yes, no one is born as an expert. However, the problem is when an experienced user needs to provide 2nd level support. If he passes through the filter of the mentioned 1st level, then his hair can turn completely grey.

The best rule of the ticket is that it is taken in order. Which, of course, is ok. No severity ID. It's free of charge service.

The problem, however, is that an experienced user who has submitted a ticket and subsequently tests the scenarios and tries to provide ongoing information to the ticket is penalized.

Why?

Because someone handy at Synology support has set up to receive tickets so that if something is added to the ticket content, such ticket is sent to the last position and can wait again to get the turn.
Imagine what happens to such a ticket if you add new findings twice or more. :unsure:
You probably already understand why I tried to be calm in the begining.
Then it is better to open several tickets for the same issue, to play the same game with the stup.d Syno habit, vs. to be precise to keep all info in a single thread - they can group the tickets.

Synology support is terrible. I mean the European part. Don't have experiences from the rest of the world.

If you already get to the consultation, you will be approached by someone who is unfortunately ready for answers from the largest segment of users - newbies. This will probably mean that the time of processing your ticket will be delayed again. When someone at Synology Support finally understands that an experienced user with an additional dose of paranoia will in no way provide Root access for the SSH of their NAS, they will finally send it to the 2nd level support.

Pls. don't send the debug.dat file to Synology:
It's really funny when Syno asks from your DSM debug log or Drive debug log. Because it contains really sensitive information about everything in your NAS, including user names, FDQN, IP addresses, folder structures, User IDs, .... no one knows where it will be stored and who can see all the files.
Just aks from what exact files they need from this bunch. Open the files in some better editor like Notepad++ and try to find mentioned "jewelry", replace the values by something more secure and prepare for Syno a written "dictionary" about the replaced data.

In addition, the support requester learns that Synology has few people to support, and the number of tickets is rising.
So with a dose of patience, such user gets to the point where they finally provide him with a time slot. Someone from Taiwan can connect to his computer via TeamViewer and use his collection of tools for comprehensive NAS management. In principle, an ordinary Putty is enough. However, someone also has something more serious.

Conclusion:
This is due to the fact that Synology offers Free Service. It also corresponds to the quality.
Support for 6M users.
When I compare it with the support from Wix, which I use for suitable purposes, you have a call back from the support within a few hours, and the problem was solved that day. I don't mean a trivial issue like a forgotten password. And Wix operates services for up to 200M users. Just for comparison with Syno attitude.


How to do it better:
this month, I've been communicating my thoughts somewhere on how this could work better. Reason - people like blames, but they don't have an idea, how to do it better.
When something is for free, resp. in the cost of the box purchased it can’t work entirely.

A simplified consideration:
when from 6M active NAS users just 5% = 300k will be willing to contribute 5 EUR monthly subscription
it will be 18M EUR revenue for the advanced support channel (direct 2nd level)

when just 10% of them yearly will ask for the support = 30k tickets issued
it means 136 tickets per working day (220 WD/y)
when 50% of them will have the same topic (ofc it will be more % value) = 68 tickets daily ... it means 68 critical errors in DSM or Syno packages DAILY discovered! What a buggy environment.
and 80% of them was resolved in the near past, it will remain = 14 tickets daily for resolving x 220days = 3,080 critical tickets annually
5 days for single ticket resolving = 5d x 14tickets = 70 people in team

when the team of 70 2nd level engineers + 4 coordinators will spend 15M EUR yearly in total staff cost+related OPEX = 202,703.00 EUR/head (all the related costs include offices rentals, ...),
they will get 18M (reve) - 15M (cost) = 3M EUR yearly for tuning of such services, to the best ever level.

It will cover >3k heavy issues yearly. With proper knowledge base maintenance, it’s really useful for power users.

However, at a time when the world is full of average people, this will not be provided by Syno. Because they need more time for new sh.ts discovering ...

What about you?
 
Last edited:
My results:
I have had 3 separate tickets get to tier 2:
2 of 3 were issues with APPS (DS File, DS CAM), that went dead after a NAS or APP update.
In Each case, they needed confirmation that firmware everywhere was up to date (NAS & Router), and wanted debug file that they said was fine. They wanted to concentrate on NAS & Router, not the APP in question. In 2 cases they actually went into NAS and looked around. (Nothing bad found)
As it turns out. The DS FILE issue they could not find: “NAS is Fine!” And ticket was closed. THIS ISSUE: Was fixed by next NAS firmware update to the DS720+!
The other APP issue: DS CAM, Was an APP problem, but only After multiple V7 update requests: as a “Possible” fix, requests were objected to by me after a 6.2 NAS update did not fix problem (“That 6.2 should do it!”) and their own comments that one of 3 NAS’s that were affected did not have Ram for V7! It was the APP. I tested the beta fix!
The third Support request of mine that made it to Tier 2 (Tier 1 liked the idea, and forwarded it to Tier 2), was a request for “hits” to be added to NAS Firewall like Router Firewall had.
This was immediately rejected by Tier 2 as: “Un-necessary”, and the ticket was closed.

And I get tagged as: ‘someone with a bad attitude’!
 
When I opened the ticket for the Audio Station Alexa skill I had three responses, 1st was that they saw I went into the NAS using Putty/command line and that I had a Bonded network config and was ready to say they couldn't support me until I stated that yes I use the Bonded network config on Unifi switches and I had to putty into the box to fix a proxy issue. Thus, that response moved me to tier 2 where they collected logs and after that they stated more folks were reporting the issue and they would get back to me. They never got back and the problem magically resolved due to something Amazon did. I replied one last time to say it's working and what did they do. And Synology replied nothing.
 
My last ticket was opened on Nov 5th, with zero movements till now = 19 days

I counted it, since April 2019 I have had 16 tickets.

12 of them were serious DSM / Pckg errors
just one of them was directly managed by Taiwanese engineers through assisted TeamViewer session to my computer
5 of them were never solved
 
I think you're being a little harsh. I've owned Synology products (4 of them) for about a year. I'm a beginner when it comes to networks and NAS devices. I've had several questions, most of which I got answered here on this forum and a handful by Synology tech support. They invariable responded to my questions within 24 hours with an over 50% success rate.

Compared to my previous experience with Western Digital (which was non-existent to truly awful and basically a waste of time) I think their free service is OK.

Maybe people with a large number of tickets are deprioritized some?
 
I think you're being a little harsh.
I disagree. The difference is here...
I'm a beginner when it comes to networks and NAS devices.
Support answers the basic questions from those with little/no NAS experience. Questions coming from experienced users often languish as they typically are running up against bugs/flaws in Synology software, for which support has no answers.

I ran across a similar experience over at the "community" where nearly none of the questions I have posted, were met with a response. Escalating those questions to Synology support, met with the same ... <crickets>
 
@sktn77a
Assumption is mother of all “fu*ck ups!”.
You can be sure that if I am already looking for help from Synology support, it will be a serious problem associated with the anomalies of DSM (packages) behavior at the level of core services. And only when I haven't found the answer anywhere else. I don't use the Syno community because there is nothing new to learn from April 2019.
However, I understand that everyone has their own requirements defined by their level of knowledge. Otherwise we would be clones of single person.

Dissatisfaction is the foundation of development.
 
For a better understanding of the level of my interest from the support side. One of the solved tickets:
just for a share of deeper info here.

This year it all came together for me, why Syno created a story about its own disks for the "more powerful" NAS ranges. Because they use such a highly proprietary twisted RAID solution based on Device-mapper and BTRFS FS, which no one uses at all in NAS, even complex storage environments.
The second reason is that RAID 5 or 6 is still in the experimental stage for BTRFS. Then just the strange marriage with the Device-mapper works to keep it.
Including a Cache based heading on the years-abandoned Cache system (Flashcache) from Facebook.
They have no choice but to customize the DSM and disk firmware to make it works. Yes, it works. But for such "tax". This is not a development. This is salvation.

Here are some hard facts about it:

The reason Why Fedora or Suse don't use such combination of RAID and FS (in the link above) is explained here:
 
Today I received an irresistible offer from Synology support:

Alternatively, you can upload the file to any public cloud, such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, and create a share link there.

If it is a file that contains my latest scientific work, which is public, I would be happy to do so. However, in this case, it was a request from Synology Support to send the traditional Debug.dat.

For those who don't know yet - Debug.dat - is a copy of your DSM with everything a skilled person needs to visit your system and the subsystems you run on the DSM. Including reviewing your codes/scripts that you entered via SSH, e.g. your usr/psw credentials to access container services, ... everything.

This already goes beyond all my lost illusions about Synology support at the first level. Next time they can hire Walmart cashiers there.
 
Today I received an irresistible offer from Synology support:



If it is a file that contains my latest scientific work, which is public, I would be happy to do so. However, in this case, it was a request from Synology Support to send the traditional Debug.dat.

For those who don't know yet - Debug.dat - is a copy of your DSM with everything a skilled person needs to visit your system and the subsystems you run on the DSM. Including reviewing your codes/scripts that you entered via SSH, e.g. your usr/psw credentials to access container services, ... everything.

This already goes beyond all my lost illusions about Synology support at the first level. Next time they can hire Walmart cashiers there.
Oh my god... Epic failure...

It also bugs me that a company that specializes in centralized storage that should compete with other public clouds like Google Drive etc doesn't give out an upload link on their own C2 platforms or something.

For example: When I need to send a (secure / big) file to someone, I give them a Drive/Nextcloud link to the file on my NAS. No way I'm using Google Drive/OneDrive/WeTransfer whatever.

C'mon, a little professionalism ain't that hard.
 
C'mon, a little professionalism ain't that hard.

I'm afraid it's not possible for most of the population that their brain uses more energy than any other human organ because this world would have to look completely different. Therefore, there must exist some kind of workshops to adjust the energy intake for the brain so that the remaining organs can survive. What must be reflected in the consequences associated with thinking.
This has long led me to think that obese people need to be wise.
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account on our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Similar threads

Why?! 🤔 If you want to filter websites, you’ll need pi-hole, otherwise your clients on the LAN will use...
Replies
25
Views
2,614
  • Question
What's stopping you? Probably Synology wanting you to upgrade your NAS to take advantage of this "feature".
Replies
3
Views
1,879
  • Question
There was always an issue with RAW (DNG, in my case) formats being supported by Synology. I hoped it would...
Replies
0
Views
2,373
I'll agree with EAZ on this - not something I'd sweat. DSM should be quite adequately able to monitor...
Replies
4
Views
2,093
I don't have a motivation to save Synology position, but the problem comes from Intel. Of course Synology...
Replies
10
Views
3,712
My post was a bit garbled, no European telephone support, confirmed by UK head office.
Replies
2
Views
2,079
Reuse in matter or minutes. New container on the new device with docker using the existing volume. BW will...
Replies
12
Views
918

Welcome to SynoForum.com!

SynoForum.com is an unofficial Synology forum for NAS owners and enthusiasts.

Registration is free, easy and fast!

Back
Top