[beachstartup]

"my cluster is unresponsive" is not straightforward at all. in fact it's the vaguest, most un-straightforward kind of problem you could have.

one of the interview questions i ask is "a customer calls in and said their system is unresponsive. what do you do?"

this will weed out a bullshitter 99% of the time, because the potential problem domain is the entire OSI stack, across the open internet, and also could be potentially on the customer side, which is most likely also a complex setup.

if you want someone who can actually fix the problem to help you, it's going to cost a lot of money. one of these people is six figures. now imagine a whole team of them, 3 shifts a day, every single day, forever.

[robalfonso]

You miss my point, I simply mean a forum post is not ideal for support. In my case I would want a ticket, something concrete I know can be sent and seen. A forum does not engender confidence my issue will be seen and also I would not want to put private info into a forum.

Also I gave a poor example. I run a Es cluster so my thinking is at the point of my cluster is unavailable i know it's all red and it's not between my service and the endpoint.

[beachstartup]

anything free or included will be abused by a certain % of the customer base.

if you feel that strongly about it, buy the support.