Where do enhancements requests go and why are they not published/voted on?

[gjanders]

I'd appreciate if anyone from Splunk could answer this question, but I would also like feedback from other Splunk customers too!

Over the years of using Splunk I've opened a number of enhancement requests and as the case is closed there is a message sent that enhancement requests go the the account directory in charge of the account and any escalation can be done via that person.

However at least some of these enhancements were already requested by other Splunk customers.
One example is the search history of users been replicated to each member of a search head cluster. As an example in the 6.5.x versions (and 6.6 AFAIK) if a user logs out of a search head in a search head cluster and logs into a different search head within the same cluster their search history is non-existent or different to other cluster members, and this is quite confusing for Splunk users!

Since I've seen some companies (literally) throw out the enhancement list once it got too large, where does Splunk track the enhancements and why are they not published somewhere where they can be voted on ? Such as Splunk Answers ?

Thanks

[rphillips_splk · Accepted solution]

@garethatiag I've been a Support Engineer for Splunk for almost 3years so I have seen and filed many enhancement requests on behalf of customers. The primary purpose for support cases are for break/fix. If a case is determined to be an enhancement request it is no longer actionable by the support engineer and the case gets assigned out to the enhancement request queue. From there it is evaluated by the product manager for the feature/component in question in terms of priority, number of customers affected, complexity to implement and resources required etc..
The enhancement requests are tracked internally through our ticketing system and are not thrown out. Depending on priority, criticality etc some enhancements can take much longer than others to fulfill unfortunately. As of today we don't expose these enhancement requests to the public. If you know the enhancement request number the best option I can suggest at this time is to put some pressure on your account manager to advocate for your use case and urgency.
I see the enhancement request you mentioned above is being tracked under SPL-96465 "Per-user search history does not honor concurrent updates on a single node and does not replicate across search head cluster members" which several other customers are requesting. As of now the enhancement does not include which version this might be addressed in.

[gjanders]

@rphillips thankyou for the answer, just to be clear I wasn't making the accusation that Splunk was throwing enhancement requests away.

I'm going to accept your answer, however my point that the enhancement list should be at least visible and ideally voted on by customers does remain, I've also let my account manager know about this particular question as I believe that other customers would something similar (I have 9 votes on this question which is more than I have ever had before).

@easy, @woodcock, @dstaulcu your comments are also appreciated here!

[gjanders]

@rphillips one part of my question that remains unanswered is can I see the enhancement requests or does that remain only internally visible? I believe it's internal to Splunk which is the reason for my question...

[rphillips_splk]

@garethatiag - at this time customers cannot see enhancement request and they are only internal to Splunk

[gjanders]

@rphillips Thanks for your assistance here!

[easy]

Everything Rob said. Plus, the Community team (which runs Answers) has long-range plans to work with Support and Product Management to surface some subset of enhancement requests to the public for upvoting and comment. We get great feedback / bug reports / ideas from customers and we would like to get more customer input to help us prioritize them.

[dstaulcu]

re: surface some subset of
enhancement requests to the public for
upvoting and comment. We get great
feedback / bug reports / ideas from
customers and we would like to get
more customer input to help us
prioritize them.

This is exactly what I needed to hear. And if product teams can't manage the filtering process we as a community could simply post our enhancement request details to answers for down/up voting and for community-based contribution on requirement decomposition process.

[woodcock]

If that is true then check out the #bugs and #wishlist Splunk Slack channels. These are always FULL of ideas/problems.