It's imposslbe to go to my dashboard

[sixcorners]

You all are 0/4 on handling my bug reports. If even this doesn't get fixed this will be the last time I will report a bug this way.

The context menu to go to the dashboard goes away when you try to move your mouse over it.

Here is video of the issue: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/919882621503275078/919884566871810099/splunk.m4v

[johnhuang]

Try to isolate the issue and rule out things like your browser and addons. Try from a different browser, and if you are using chrome, try from incognito.

[sixcorners]

It happens in chrome's incogneto mode too. I think the problem is with the page. There are areas south of that button that dismiss the context menu.

[PickleRick]

Whatever gave you the idea that this is a support portal? It's a community forum and people respond to questions on their own free will.

[sixcorners]

Well maybe you can point me in the right direction then?

At work I find very basic and frustrating problems with this software. For example I frequently click on a context menu in splunk that says "new search" to start a new search on a specific piece of information from the results of a previous search. The query that splunk creates is akin to this "* | spath source | search source=app-name". This query is very slow. I believe the query splunk should make should look like "source=app-name".

I explain this to someone at work. They explain it to a splunk support person. The support person says that the query is slow... He gives plenty of detail for why the query is slow. When I ask if I could talk to them I'm told I'm not on the support contract.. This is months of interactions here. There doesn't seem to be a path forward here where I can make it understood that I think the problem is that splunk shouldn't generate these queries.

Ok. What about this website? How hard can it be to file a bug? I'm sure splunk wants to have working softare. I made an account. The only place to give feedback seems to be an option to make a support case. That links here. I've been making support cases here ever since.

In truth I think part of the problem is that I don't know what everything is called. I might be using a page that most people don't normally see. I don't really know what "apps" are or what ITSI is. They all seem to let me search. When I explain the problem to people it never seems to connect so we must just be looking at different things. All I know is that I'm performing searches in an app called IT Service Intelligence on a page that looks like the image here: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/SplunkCloud/latest/SearchTutorial/Startsearching except that the events are made to look like json.

What should be my next step? Is there one? Is there any avenue for end users to report problems or is support at splunk really just for the b2b contacts at my company that saddled us with these problems in the first place?

[PickleRick]

It seems that either your company doesn't have enough resources to support its own users. Sorry, but that's kinda typical to all solutions - support as such is a servis providing, well, support in case something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. And has its limits.

If you need training or help with using any solution (not just splunk) and developing custom content, there are usually separately paid forms of services delivered either by the manufacturer itself (like Splunk Professional Services) or your local partner. It's how pretty much all of IT world works.

Of course there is this community in which we share our questions and findings but there's no guarantee that anyone will be able to help or even be willing to help with a particular question (after all nobody's paying community users for this). But that's also typical to product forums.

If you want to get more proficient with Splunk though you could start by taking the Splunk Fundamentals 1 free course. That really helps at the beginning.

[sixcorners]

That is true. I don't blame him though. The person at my company is busy doing things. I also didn't particularly want to play the game of telephone either.

And I don't know if I agree with this. My company also uses datadog. There was a bug in their UI. I submitted a ticket with them and they fixed it in what felt like less than a day. It was actually kind of concerning... I hope they have good unit tests. I get the impression from them that they care a lot about problems their end users experience using their software.

Anyway are we sure that the story here is that there is no way to give feedback directly to splunk? That if there is a bug or a security vulnerability then the best place to direct that is this website (essentially a subreddit I guess) or a trash can? That end users aren't really customers so they can bring it up at their next support group or something?

I'll check out that course but if it turns out that the app doesn't matter because this search page is the same in every app and there isn't a good reason people don't understand when I refer to a "context menu that appears when you click a value in the search results" or "the 'new search' option in the context menu"  then in my mind it will seriously call into question how much splunk actually gets used by people.

[PickleRick]

Of course there are different approaches to support. I haven't used Splunk's support myself (I work for a partner and usually it's the customer who contacts the support if all else fails) so can't share my experiences with it.

But.

Well, Splunk Enterprise as such is a platform. A platform that can be used for many different things.  By comparison, you can't expect to set up a MSSQL server, give access to an SQL client to your employers and expect that they fully utilize its capacities, you can't expect that people who don't understand SPL and how the apps work and so on will be proficient Splunk power users. That's why it's typical for Splunk installation to have power users who can do many things on their own and also ordinary users who use preinstalled apps to get predefined reports and that's it. Just as with your typical RDBMS your users don't interact with the database itself but have some applications on top of it.

If you want to learn, there's plenty of resources out there. The forum users here are helpful if they can answer the question. But as with any such voluntarily-provided help, you won't get far with demanding attitude 😉

But if your local Splunk environment doesn't have anyone to properly take care of it... well, that's mostly your internal problem and I'd strongly advise that you get some help from either Splunk's PS or your local Splunk partner if you don't have skilled people in-house.

For the bugs, there's support. And no, end user is not the same as customer. Sorry, but that's how it works. As with practically every IT solution I know and I've ever deployed, you have a pre-defined list of people who are entitled to call the support. Why? Because support costs money. I suppose Splunk could offer your company a service with virtually unlimited number of people entitled to call support and file cases but that would cost so much that noone in their sane mind would pay it.

[sixcorners]

mssql does care about their end users. Their place to submit bugs used to be called microsoft connect. Now they have a new thing. And yes I think you can generally expect that the people who get paid to write the software would be interested to know when basic functionality doesn't work. If it was my software I would find things like broken links and broken menu options embarrassing and feedback related to those things would be appreciated.

Our environment is taken care of. It's just that neither he nor I want to spend months playing telephone.

And after looking into it, I now know that the app thing doesn't matter at all. The menu option is broken on the new search view regardless of the app it is on. I can now think of no software-related reason for people to not know about splunk's search page.