[nhubbard]

Any tier of Google Support is 100% a black hole. I had an extremely unusual issue with a service in Google Cloud, tried to debug it and failed. I filed a ticket and waited because P1 was only for “production” issues, but our issue was for development.

A few days later, the Google engineer assigned notes to us that we can escalate to P1 if this is blocking our workflow, even when not in production. I take this to my manager and they agree that it’s time to move it to P1.

We move it to P1 and immediately get traction, only to be stonewalled by a support engineer confidently asserting that the code throwing the error, which only existed in a private Google-maintained container, which only interfaced with our app through launching a cloud job through their platform, was actually our responsibility.

No joke, they actually said “As stated in my prior message, this issue is due to your code”, despite our code being a thin wrapper around their demonstration code to run it from the command line.

In my most business professional tone, I tell them off for lying to us about them debugging on their end and inform them that I will be immediately escalating because of this dissatisfactory response. This finally gets the ticket moving and a few weeks later, a bug fixed version of the entire platform is deployed.

Total time from start to finish:

- P2: 2.5 weeks of daily updates - P1, until we’re told that it’s our fault: 8 hours - P1 escalated until issue was completely fixed: 5 weeks

We paid for premium support. I cannot imagine how bad free support is.