Documentation Site Updates: Recent Changes

The one-way switch from CommCell Console to Software isn’t a great user experience for the unloved legacy customers.

It seems like another push to move over to their SaaS product.

Unfortunately this has been the way all software vendors have been heading for the past few years and not unique to CV. Kill off the stand-alone and push toward SaaS with the lure of new features or cheaper pricing → customer moves to SaaS -→ then comes the downside, you cant use the software without always being under contract, features disappear and you cant hold your upgrade although you rely on that feature. etc..

Hey folks,

Sharing my perspective on your comments.

 ​@Ponte_Vedra,

Software isn't going anywhere - one of the major benefits to Commvault is the choice - There are large swaths of organization that will never adopt SaaS, and Commault will continue to have software solutions to suit the mode that works best for your organization. There are of course, some workloads like M365 that very difficult to support in a software motion, and where SaaS becomes a more scalable and adaptable way to protect those workloads with ever changing cloud architectures and APIs.

There is a lot of work going on now to bridge the experience between the two deployment models. For example, the onboarding/getting started wizards in command center often differ between software and SaaS - and for many workloads, you might be surprised to hear that they are replacing the SaaS experience with how it functions in software today.

​@Erase4ndReuseMedia 

CommCell Console is still available today and no EOL has been announced. There is very minimal additions and improvements (if any) being added, with the new workloads going into Command Center only. From a documentation perspective, this also means very little change is needed to the expert docs since it was (mostly) modeled around that user interface. I still have love for the old way, as many do, but I do appreciate the new way as well, with all the changes and enhancements brought forward over the last few years. There are some new and exciting changes and enhancements on the way for Command Center that I hope to showcase on the community (and, get our customers to weigh in on upcoming changes as well). Stay tuned for that!

​@Damian Andre - I genuinely appreciate your perspective, but from my perspective as a legacy customer - it just seems like death by a thousand cuts, to the point where alternatives are being considered.

for me I would love to know what happened Step 3 ! It was there last week as I was preparing for a Cleanroom setup.

 https://documentation.commvault.com/11.40/software/configure_auto_scaling_for_your_azure_recovery_group.html

​@Erase4ndReuseMedia just to be clear on your feedback aren't you happy with the focus on Command Center? This topic focusses on the documentation and if you're feedback is more oriented on the product itself then we should open a separate topic on it and gather/collect information from customers that will, hopefully, be picked-up by engineering. 

for me I would love to know what happened Step 3 ! It was there last week as I was preparing for a Cleanroom setup.

 https://documentation.commvault.com/11.40/software/configure_auto_scaling_for_your_azure_recovery_group.html

 

 

Hi ​@atitagain,

Thanks for pointing that out in the article! I’ve informed the team so that we can figure out what went wrong and fix it. We'll give you an update as soon as possible.

Thank you!

Roy

I look forward to it - because the current Command Center Interface is difficult to use in a single screen environment(i.e laptop). Having a bunch of browser windows open, or constantly refreshing, endless scrolling in the job controller(may be unique to my situation since we have 100’s of tlog jobs that take a backup every 15min), etc - it makes it difficult to be ‘a single pane of glass view’. I find myself alt tabbing constantly to monitor what’s going on versus the Java view things are just there…

Command center is great when I need to update powerpoint slides for my c-suite.

My feedback is on the changes to the Documentation site. Removing the option to quickly navigate between “Software” and “CommCell Console” is just one of the ‘cuts’ I later refer to.

for me I would love to know what happened Step 3 ! It was there last week as I was preparing for a Cleanroom setup.

 https://documentation.commvault.com/11.40/software/configure_auto_scaling_for_your_azure_recovery_group.html

 

 

Hi ​@atitagain,

Thanks for pointing that out in the article! I’ve informed the team so that we can figure out what went wrong and fix it. We'll give you an update as soon as possible.

Thank you!

Roy

Hi ​@atitagain,

The article page has been fixed.

Thanks!
 

Roy 

​@Sougato Roy thanks for this 

OK ,it’s been a while.

Today I was looking for documentation about CommserveDR reconfiguration and Commserve LiveSync, but both docs.commvault.com or documentation.commvault.com sites are unreachable, connection times out. 

I tried to use the MA chatbot to see if he’d be aware of a current downtime or else.

It linked me to..

Documentation Links:

• External URLs for Commvault Features
• Commvault Cloud Status page

1st links to https://documentation.commvault.com/2023e/software/external_urls_for_commvault_features.html that’s down

2nd links to https://cloud.commvault.com/status (wow this looked like THE thing I wanted)

but lands to 404 (sob) 

Sad, isn’t it ?

So I wrote to the bot that the link were down. He replied the usual stuff to troubleshoot by connection (company key datacenter, yes), but at the end mentionned :

Contact Commvault Support

• If you require urgent documentation or need to report the outage, contact Commvault Support directly via the Support Portal.

There is no alternative official status page for Commvault documentation access.

Would I reach out to MA to mention their doc site is down? Meh. I’d have to classify ticket with job ids and unrelevant stuff.

So, alone, helpless, it’s not an emergency, so I’ll forget this topic, as an old customer used to on-prem software deployed and not SAAS happy..

Hi ​@Laurent thank you for flagging. This is a temporary outage related to the global Microsoft Azure outage. See the broader advisory here. We are working on it and will update when possible - sorry for the disruption.

It looks like the docs site is back up - which is more than I can say for microsoft.com at the moment 😶

This should be in the realm of what you are looking for: https://documentation.commvault.com/2023e/software/commserve_livesync_for_high_availability_disaster_recovery.html