I found the fastest way to open a sev 1 case is to open it online as sev 3, that gets all the questions out of the way, then call the 800 number and escalate to network down emergency. You then hold for the next available engineer. I am pleased with the responsiveness of this approach. d On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Jon Garrison <bluegill@freeshell.org> wrote:

On 3 Sep 2014, at 12:23, Jared Mauch wrote:

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On Sep 3, 2014, at 5:00 AM, Isaac Adams <isaacnanog@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Folks,

I am trying to work out a strategy for vendor certification in our company. As a general rule, do you all fund employees certification and if so what kind of levels do you try to maintain as good practice?

For example. NOC staff should be JNCIA and engineering JNCIP to JNCIE?

Clearly certification does not usually reflect ability but it does help people feel valued and to maintain a basic level of competence.

Cisco discriminates against customers without certification and delays service and support to them as a result. (e.g.: you can’t open a sev 1 case online unless you are “CCIE”).

You can however just call them and yell "Environment Down" and they will call it whatever Sev you want. There are an unending number of issues with their online case opening "portal" however.

Filling out a form online to wait a call back was never my first choice. Plus putting that Cisco hold music on speaker is a good way to improve the mood!

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You likely want to have someone with this access in their account to speed access when there are network critical issues.

- Jared

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