Examples of being bounced by Salesforce Support to forums when encountering a GACK

Question

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.

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Some examples I've found so far:

• Getting a log/stack trace from an Error Id with basic support

“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.”

• Netsuite -> Salesforce integration - Salesforce error

“We tried opening a case to salesforce but the closed it because we do not have a development support.”

• An internal server error has occurred Error ID: 84564146-14190 (747219706)

“I called technical support but they don't provide standard support to developer account. Please help me to solve this problem.”

• Test.setCreatedDate fails on note record created in test context

"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."

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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?

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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.

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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.

Answer 1

Encountered a GACK on code that was working fine in all of my development orgs, but blew up when it was in a managed package installed on a 3rd party org.

I opened the case two weeks ago and even went through the effort of setting up two test orgs for support to show them the expected result and the GACK result. The steps for replication were clearly laid out in the description for the ticket.

I am not sure if support even bothered to log in and see the error. I was told to turn to the forums for support. Waited a day or so for the manual escalation button to appear, then I escalated the case. Promptly received a phone call that they saw the escalation and would be active in the case.

For the next week, I was getting daily comments on the case that they were reaching out to additional support teams for assistance. At the end of the week, they said they were unable to obtain support and resent the EXACT SAME form letter prompting me to turn to the forums.

I escalated the case again asking for immediate transfer to R&D. They responded that I would receive a phone call the next day, but they never called.

I closed the case yesterday out of frustration. Thanks for nothing, Salesforce.

Answer 2

I don't submit bugs anymore due to this, I wait for them to be resolved and in the meantime find workarounds.

I did however have an instance where, in a packaging org, I was unable to delete a field (field was not part of the packageyet) and when doing so it produced a GACK:

Error ID: 1800041251-29917 (-596761184)

The Tier 1 rep said there was no way for SF to access a GACK Log. They wanted me to reproduce the scenario which I was unwilling to do as it would have put the managed application at risk if the field could not be deleted.

I asked repeatedly to be escalated or to be provide with the GACK log so I could determine what was going on to no avail and they closed the case.

Case# 16711375

Ultimately I was able to find that by modifying the Child Relationship name on the field before deletion the field was able to be deleted. I was able to reproduce the error several times after that but the actual cause remains unknown.

I hope you get somewhere with this. As it stands ISV's end up providing free salesforce support to SF customers due to Process builder causing all sorts of problems and with the inability to report bugs it affects the quality of their product and the code written by others (workarounds).

I believe that anyone with a Platform II / Advanced Dev credential should have a way to report bugs that will not get immediately shut down regardless of their Premier Support status.

While this is not an exact scenario you were asking for it is one where they say they cannot access any logs for GACKs and refuse to escalate because one does not have Premier support.

Answer 3

Ghost processes / batch processes (NA34 and NA39)

Case# 16110681

There was an issue a while back where SF Hammer tests caused callouts to make it outside of salesforce.

I reported the case as a Bug and it was closed because the Tier 1 wanted me to reproduce. When I explained that it was impossible to reproduce because it was something on the SF side it was closed and pointed to Developer Forums.

Important While not a GACK, this led to SF finding out about a week later they had an issue during Hammer testing putting out an Alert to inform that during the specific timeframe callouts made it to the outside world.

This cost our customers a significant amount real money. I was added to the List of people grouped with the issue after they found out they had it.

Bottom line, if they had not closed the case they may have realized there was an issue sooner