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pmdci
Advocate V
Advocate V

Lack of transparency from Microsoft around outages and degraded service

Hi,

 

One of the Power BI Embedded clusters assigned to the North Europe region in Azure has been experiencing some service degradation, in which reports can take over 1.5 minutes to load. Sometimes even more than that. This issue has been going on for weeks and it has been afecting our sales.

 

I have opened a case with Microsoft on this on Aug/28, and I have been informed that other customers followed suit. I am however, shocked with the poor initial suport experience provided by Microsoft, and the lack of transparency around the issue.

 

First, it took a extremely long time for the issue to be taken with the expect level of seriousness. The initial support rep was way too keen to blame the issue on anedcotal stuff such as "a trial Power BI Pro account". Only after I demanded that the case was dealt directly by Microsoft that I got somewhere with the case (initially the case was handled by one of the many vendors that Microsoft use to provide support).

 

Then there is the issue of transparency. I checked several times on both the Azure Service Status page and on the Power BI Service Status page to see if there is some sort of update on the issue. To my surprise, the issue was NEVER EVER highlighted. I raised this with thesenior technical advisor for the Microsoft Business Application Platforms (BAP), and he agreed with me that this was not acceptable and he escalated the issue. That was on the 30th of August and guess what? Not only the problem is still ongoing, but they never updated the servie status page(s). I raised this issue with the BAP technical advisor again. Here is what I said:

 

"I just had a call with [Support Representative] and I mentioned to her that even though you escalated this feedback, I believe nothing has been done to inform users that there has been degradation in the service for a given cluster in North Europe. I remember checking both the Power BI and the Azure status pages and there was no amber sign anywhere.

 

The problem is back, I can confirm that again there is no amber mark in the support pages for either Power BI or Azure in North Europe.

 

I find this to be quite unprofessional and completely against the ISO 20000 standard and ITIL best practices. In fact I think it is quite disingenuous of whoever at Microsoft who made a conscious decision on not to update those pages to reflect the service degradation of this Power BI Embedded cluster in North Europe."

 

I got a reply pretty much in agreement, saying that "this is not how [Microsoft] should operate, and [Microosft] should be totally transparent as to Service issues and degradation".

 

So I wonder: Is this how the "New/One Microsoft" operates? By being underhanded and disingenuous about issues on their services?

3 REPLIES 3
v-juanli-msft
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @pmdci

We are very sorry for this kind of inconvenience.

Could you kindly have a look at this Support page about Awareness of Power BI, it seems similar with your problem.

7.png

As for awareness and issues listed on this page, it needs to be verified and is reported to happen to a lot of people.

 

Best Regards

Maggie

 

Hi @v-juanli-msft

 

Yeah seems like this was finally added after I followed up on my threat of going public with this rant.

 

YET -- This should be an AMBER mark since the service is degraded, not a blue "info" icon. So I am still quite annoyed and I feel like Microsoft is downplaying the issue and being disingenuous.

Now,

 

After a series of emails questioning Microsoft, as well as this post...

 

2018-09-13_11-53-41.png

 

Now, that is more like it. It is a shame though that I have to resort to public bashing to get Microsoft to do the right thing.

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