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Business Products => Avast Business => Cloud Management Console & Clients => Topic started by: Tom610 on January 09, 2022, 09:53:35 AM

Title: My expirience with the Business hub after a few month with over 2.200 clients!
Post by: Tom610 on January 09, 2022, 09:53:35 AM
Hello,

as Avast Partner we are using the Hub since may 2021.

Our expierience with the hub is verry... intense.

First of all I might add that the way contacting the support from within the Hub and response time is good! Sometime I have to explain the issue more then once because of language problems but I can handle that. Response time is verry critical for a solustion like Avast Business Hub.

Now the major problem with the Hub:

Ever since using it there is a bunch of bugs that let me doubt that Avast is doing anything like quality management. There is almost every time a new bug that comes after an Hub update.
Using global policies is no fun since there is this old bug CBC-18046 that hasn't been resolved until now.
Obviously this is some kind of method with some bugs since I've seen a bug related to alert messages related to deaktivated components... This was around since 2020 as far as I have seen it here?
Now what did Avast? They did not fix the issue but they removed the alert category...
Imagine a car vendor would do that: "Hey the tires loose air from time to time... shit it's too hard to fix it, let's remove the tires!"

Support availability:
The Hub support should be also available with some kinde of emergency hotline on weekend and holiday. Yesterday I encountered a bug that is related to the reboot option of the hub. The bug lead to the situation where the hub initiated reboots for hours! Servers where in some kind of reboot loop and some customers weren't able to work of course...
No support in this case is a no go!
I will escalate this issue with our german representive but guys believe me that situation was a horror imagine this bug will be present also on monday.
And we are managing ofer 2.200 clients from within the hub!

So support availability and bugfixing is a major issue with the hub!

Whats your expirience?
Title: Re: My expirience with the Business hub after a few month with over 2.200 clients!
Post by: Pavel Jirsak on January 12, 2022, 02:06:35 PM
Hi Tom610,
thank you for sharing your feedback and opening this conversation up.

First, let me apologize for any bugs impacting your experience with the Hub. We could have done a much better job here, I have to admin.
When it comes to the specific bug you mentioned (CBC-18046), I am personally aware of it and I know it takes us a bit longer to fix than expected due to the complexity of the fix. The latest status is that we have a solution and our testers are validating it. It should be resolved very soon.

In terms of the Alert category, in fact, we have disabled one specific alert, not the whole category of alerts. As you correctly said, we could make it work right so we decided to disable it for the time being as it was generating more false positive alerts than true situations where a person or a malware would disable any of the running shields. Also, our decision was supported by two facts. (i) modified shields are automatically put back into their intended state every few minutes when synced with the policy is done and (ii) the UI can be completely disabled for end-users so that those shields cannot be modified manually.

We are planning to enable this specific alert as soon as we can make it work right so it doesn't create frustrations.

I hope this helps.
Best, Pavel
Title: Re: My expirience with the Business hub after a few month with over 2.200 clients!
Post by: Tom610 on January 12, 2022, 03:34:13 PM
Hello Pavel,

thanks for the input.

As for the alerts that makes sense so far but requires the global policies to work...
I see the point in that but Avast should have checked the policy thing better in the first place. Whats pretty anoying on that topic: Avast support is not so transparent... I needed to ask from time to time, also get in touch with Avast german reps. for even getting a clue that someone is working on that. Took Avast also month to put the 18046 into the known issues section of the release info... You can do better and more transparrency will help a lot.
Imagine that we as your and the customers partner need to justify thos kind of bugs. But you can't talk some crap to any customers in order to get them quite since some of them smarter than that...

Speaking of this I might throw CBC-22357 into the ring.
I tried to get some information how it could be possible that suche a bug can happen. Ok, lets first analize the support team the main issue. But I see often that the support guys do only one thing: The ask for the required info, escalate the issue if necessary, solve it but than... whats with this "OK, what conclusions do we need to get from this issue?"

CBC-22357 is not the first example with this problem.
Since we use the hub there were 2 times the problem that it did not sent mail alerts! This issue was not found by Avast itself but it was me that was wondering about the suddenly absense of avast mails and so CBC-19815 was created last time.

These are two issue where I say: "Hey Avast this can't be! This has to be monitored from your side!"

And nobody shall say that this is not possible:

Regarding CBC-19815: Avast could surely implement some monitoring mechanism that keeps track of mail messages... and huge fluctioation would be creating an alert just befor customer will know.

Same thing with CBC-22357: Avast needs to monitor if the hub or a partner accout will create more tasks then common. During the critical time the hub created 3.000 to 5.000 reboot taks!!!!
All I got from Support was: At this moment the only available workaround is to delete all restart tasks from devices that were automatically generated.

Guys I really like the hub and the value it delivers to us and our customers. But Avast need to do its homework!
I'm willing to help where I can and I'm offering you my full support but this would require more direct contact.

The 2 sessions regarding new product features will not help in this case. Maybe you have some Idee for yourself how we both get this to work. Just keep in mind here is an Avast partner with more than 2.400 clients that is willing to help!
Title: Re: My expirience with the Business hub after a few month with over 2.200 clients!
Post by: Pavel Jirsak on January 12, 2022, 05:00:56 PM
Hi Tom610,
I am aware of the CBC-22357 and I can ensure you that our developers are on this issue at this moment. As before, I am really sorry for the inconvenience this brings.

Also, I acknowledge your intention to help so I'll drop you a message on the email address you have in your profile.
Thank you and I really appreciate your interest to make the product even better.

Best, Pavel