I'm looking to provide a number of examples to Salesforce where someone has encountered a GACK and tried to raise a support case that has subsequently been closed because they don't have access to Premier Support.
The more recent the better. I can see a lot of questions about GACKs, but it isn't always clear how their interactions with Salesforce support went.
Please try and keep the responses factual. E.g. Case Numbers, dates, and response indicating that you should take the GACK to the forums. I know full well how frustrating a GACK just before deployment to production can be, but I'd like to avoid degenerating into another "Whale Sperm">Support rant post :)
My goal is to get a positive change to the support process for GACKs where people don't have access to Premier support.
Some examples I've found so far:
“I created an support case asking if they could send us the error log or stack-trace for the given Error Id. I agent said that because they are on the "basic" support tier he could not give me that information.”
“We tried opening a case to salesforce but the closed it because we do not have a development support.”
“I called technical support but they don't provide standard support to developer account. Please help me to solve this problem.”
"I attempted to file a case with support, but since the company I work for cannot afford premier support, and developer accounts have no support access, my only option to try and contact salesforce was to post this question onto the Salesforce Success Community forums."
If you do have examples of working with support on a GACK, can you also answer the following questions.
- In the situations where people found a gack, were they pointed to a Known Issue?
- In the situations where people found a gack, did the support agent take down the steps for reproduction?
UPDATE
I've sent the feedback through to the Salesforce contact to see if they can improve the process. I'd also raised this in the Dreamforce 2017 Meet the Developers session.
As an experiment I raised a support case from a Developer Edition org with no connection to Premier support (17719714). I intentionally didn't use the term GACK and just included the Error ID.
To their credit, support:
- reproduced the error from my steps,
- isolated the cause,
- gave me a work around, and
- gave me a bug reference (W-4500854) if I wanted to get updates in the future
- said they would raise a known issue if it impacted other customers.
So a pretty good outcome in may case. Your mileage may vary.
Update 2: 2nd December 2017
Response from Salesforce on GACK support:
As I mentioned before, everyone, not just Premier support members, should have the ability to get limited gack (Internal Server Error) support. By limited, I mean that we can't help customers debug the errors or their code, nor can we give them a stack trace, but we can look the error up in the internal system to give the customer some help as to what might be causing the issue. In order to help support track down the issue, they should include the Error Id when reporting the Internal Server Error.