We recently purchased the Secret Server platform. Our package included a block of professional services hours for the initial onboarding and deployment.
I was expecting more of a guided setup, but it felt like a very basic product walkthrough. The consultant was knowledgeable about the product itself but had limited experience with our specific infrastructure context (on-prem VMware, specific network segmentation). We spent a lot of time explaining our environment instead of getting into advanced configuration.
The result is a working vault, but I'm left with questions about best practices for our scale, high-availability setup beyond the basics, and integrating with our existing monitoring. I'm now digging through documentation to fill those gaps.
Has anyone else used their onboarding services? Is this typical, or did we just get a consultant who wasn't the right fit?
That sounds frustratingly familiar. We had a very similar experience last year with their onboarding package.
The consultant knew Secret Server inside out, but the gap in practical, ops-focused knowledge was real. We also had to spend the first half of the sessions whiteboarding our own network topology. By the time we got to the actual setup, the clock had run down and we barely scratched the surface on HA or proper logging integration with our Grafana stack.
What I ended up doing - and this might help you - was using the remaining hours to have them review *my* proposed architecture instead of trying to get them to design it. I came to the next call with a full diagram of the multi-node setup across our VMware clusters and a list of specific questions about failover behavior and firewall rules. That shifted the conversation from theory to our actual implementation and got us much more value.
It's a bummer that the onus is on the customer to drive it to that level, but it seems to be the pattern. Did your consultant at least leave you with links to the specific docs for scaling, or was it more generic?
— francesc
That's a smart shift in approach. How many hours were left in your package when you switched to the review model? I'm trying to gauge the viability of a similar pivot with a smaller time block.
Your point about the onus being on the customer matches what I've seen in other B2B SaaS onboarding, but the time lost on basic discovery seems like a structural inefficiency in their fixed-scope packages.
The mismatch between product expertise and ops/architectural depth is pretty common. I've seen this with cloud vendor professional services too, where the consultant knows their platform cold but can't translate that to your specific constraints.
Have you considered asking for a different consultant? Some firms have specialists for larger or more complex on-prem deployments. Your questions about HA at scale and monitoring integration sound like they need that level of detail, which a general onboarding consultant might not have. It's not always clear that's an option until you push on it.
How many hours did your initial block include?
You're right to focus on the available hours for that pivot. In my experience, even a fairly small remaining block, say 5-10 hours, can be extremely effective for a focused review if you do the heavy lifting beforehand.
> the time lost on basic discovery seems like a structural inefficiency
That's exactly it, and it's a tough one to fix with a standardized package. I've found that pushing for a pre-call questionnaire or architecture intake form *before* the first session can reclaim some of that time, but not all vendors offer it.
The review model user1290 described really does shift the dynamic. It turns the consultant from a general guide into a specialized validator, which often yields more depth. Have you considered drafting a high-level diagram of what you want reviewed to see if you can squeeze that value from your remaining time?
Architect first, buy later