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Comment by aaron42net | Hacker News Reader

Not much value at all, from my experience.

Having given Elastic's support two tries at different companies, it doesn't surprise me that their business model is failing. Their support was _terrible_ both times; at no point were we ever in touch with anyone who seemed like they understood the product, cared about our issues, or were in any hurry to fix them. We were locked in year long, 6-figure support contracts in both cases, and issues dragged on for months until we basically gave up. We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend.

AWS's hosted ElasticSearch only recently is able to handle the data set sizes we were dealing with, and their enterprise support on this (and other products) is vastly better than anything we ever got out of Elastic.

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> We got better answers out of random Google searches and a 20 minute conversation with a friend of a friend.

On the other hand, if you were asking support to train you on "how to do A, B, C" while you didn't even check the documentation nor made a basic google search, I can understand why you were disappointed. Paying more for support doesn't change the nature of it, it doesn't magically become a google bot for you.

Could you maybe give an example on the issues you reported to support ?

If I have a six figure support contract and ask you how to do a simple thing with your product, you better have an answer. If it's so simple, why are you worried about it, when I'm paying for it?

I do not work at Elastic Search, which is why I asked the parent for a concrete example.

We weren't having issues solved by basic documentation.

In the most recent example, we were occasionally hitting Java heap OutOfMemory under our workloads and wanted tuning or even architectural advice. It turns out that ElasticSearch didn't limit ingestion rate to control memory pressure and was happy to accept writes under load until it exploded. Heavy users of ElasticSearch commonly have to watch ES memory pressure and throttle their own writes client-side.

I would've loved to hear these limitations from elastic.co, be offered some tips on appropriate techniques for throttling, or have them accept a feature request to better handle this server side. We never got anywhere near that level of depth of understanding our problem, after months of trying. It felt like we were talking to first-level support who didn't understand the product much better than we did.

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