Cisco TAC reporting in here. Server Virtualization engineer. Just wanna get this off my chest:
If you open a P1 just to get someone on the phone instead of working your case through email, stop it. You're taking our manpower away from real issues to work on something that isn't really an issue or that you've procrastinated on and are now getting screamed at from your IT Director to get it fixed by COB today.
If you open a P1 for anything other than a network down situation and when I mean network down I mean that CUCM is down, your ESXi hosts are unable to boot from SAN, no longer able to see OSPF "hellos", stuff like that, stop it. See above.
Yes, Smartnet costs a lot of money. No one is going to debate that. However, if most customers would Google stuff before opening cases, you would see that you don't really need to open that case.
My team takes upwards of 100 cases per day between all 4 severity levels. Personally I take between 4-7 cases per day on average. My backlog right now is around 40 cases. I'm fucking sorry that I can't help you all at the same time.
If you want good TAC engineer's, stop opening cases with titles like "Network Issue", "This doesn't work", "Help", "Call me" or problem descriptions like "Call me for more information" or "Call my customer for more information". That shit is a waste of time and you and I both know it.
Do your job before making TAC do it for you. If you're having an issue integrating LDAP into your CUCM or UCS, make sure to have access to Active Directory before getting on the phone with us. Again, another time sink that we could use to work on other cases.
Recreates don't just magically happen. Someone has to do it. That same someone is probably doing 7-8 recreates at the same time. Give them some slack.
Unless your TAC engineer is just a fucking idiot, all calling your account team is going to do is piss that engineer off. Guess what happens when you piss your engineer off?? We stop working on your shit.
Most team's are understaffed. The attrition rate is unbelievable. Some teams only have between 3-5 people. Others may have several, however, when people are leaving or moving positions faster than you can fill them, that's not the engineer's fault. We're doing the best we can with what we have.
If you think you can do our job better than we can, I personally invite you to come try. GG no RE