I have been puzzled by the observation that my load scenarios indicate that my product has some problems in a particular area, but Support says they almost never get any complaints related to that - and the few complaints that do appear are almost always traceable to something fixable in the customer environment.  Now, my load scenarios drive my lab systems much, much harder than the load any real customer puts on their systems, even at busy hour.  I was finally able to run some experiments with the load backed off to a realistic busy hour, and hey! those problems disappeared.  So though that area is Not Right, it probably hasn't/won't clobber us in the field.  That is actually what I thought was going on, but I was quite relieved to have some data to back it up.

I don't like it that I see those problems, but it is pretty clear that going after them is not the right thing to do.  Fixing that stuff would be difficult and expensive, it is apparently not actually affecting anyone but me, and our product is explicitly not carrier-grade.  (You need carrier-grade?  We'll be happy to refer you to a reseller of our parent company's equipment ...)

There is, of course, that "apparently".  For the most part our customers seem pretty pleased with our product - they pay for annual maintenance, they buy more ports, they buy more systems, etc.  But like every vendor, occasionally we lose a customer, and very occasionally we don't find out why.  So there's that occasional nagging thought that these problems *might* actually be hitting someone in the field.

Problems reported by customers are indications of what parts of the product need attention.  When those complaints come in, we can fix the problems as reported, and maybe do more or different testing in that area to shake out other problems before customers find them.  But for whatever reason, some customers don't complain when stuff doesn't work to their satisfaction.  Please complain!  We need that guidance!