Dear Checkmk Community,
We have important updates regarding the management of feedback@checkmk.com.
Traditionally, this email served as a channel for users to share their thoughts on Checkmk or report bugs. It was a somewhat passive process – you’d submit your feedback, and on occasion, a developer would review it during releases, addressing obvious issues.
As times have changed, so have our approaches. We’ve established new support processes through our integrated support portal, facilitating a smoother connection to our development workflows. Bugs are first reproduced by support engineers in controlled environments to eliminate side effects (e.g. custom code, custom configuration). This makes bug fixing much more efficient for us. The support portal quickly became the main source for bug reports and everyone involved realized that this is the most effective way to fix things.
Additionally, we introduced the community forum in early 2020 as a means for users to help out each other. We pushed our team to be active there as well and try to help and make time for it. The community manager got the power to pull support engineers and developers into threads in special cases.
The process of reviewing emails sent to feedback@checkmk.com gradually diminished over the years, primarily relying on individual developers who irregularly checked some of the mails there. Recognizing the need for improvement, we’ve assembled a dedicated team to manage feedback@checkmk.com. They are committed to listening, guiding you to the appropriate channels, and engaging in meaningful communication on topics within their purview.
As part of this, we also reflected on how to handle bug reports sent to feedback@checkmk.com.
It all comes down to the fact that for us to be able to act on fixing bugs, we need proper reproduction of them in clean environments. We have seen too often that the actual underlying root case of bugs were changes to Checkmk (e.g. via local files), misconfiguration or unsupported update procedures - something we have to rule out in order to be able to fix a bug.
But even if something looks like a bug, there is no effective way for us to handle incoming emails from feedback@checkmk.com in our development workflow (in contrast to our support ticket system).
Consequently, we have decided to discontinue the handling of bug reports via that specific channel.
For those seeking priority bug fixing, we recommend acquiring our software with a support package. This ensures that our support team, equipped with the necessary expertise, thoroughly reviews your support tickets, reproduces bugs, and communicates them to our developers, providing you with ongoing updates.
Bug reports sent to feedback@checkmk.com will now be directed to the community forum. This has proven in the past on many occasions as an effective means of getting independent reproduction or confirmation of a problem, and for us to share the solution. This way, other users can be aware of certain issues in advance as well.
I (@Sara) check the forum every day, and notify our team on relevant topics. We then assess the impact, and prioritize them along with our other support tickets. We do not guarantee action, but we see this change as a step in the process of moving towards more transparency and more openness in bug tracking, as well as an opportunity for more community cooperation.
We appreciate your understanding and continued support,
Sara and Checkmk Team