Best way to get support for Google App Engine issues

[gae123]

I have been using the GAE for about a year now. On the positive side,
I had very few problems. Pretty much everything works as described in
the documentation.

As far as I can remember, I had three incidents where I needed support
from Google. At the end all my issues were resolved by the great
Google folks who monitor the group BUT not in a very timely manner.

In the first incident, my problem was resolved in a couple of days. In
the other two incidents it took 5-8 days. In the most recent case,
that took 8 days we lost valuable time because of the following
reasons:

1) The Google Engineer who first handled my case what in an overseas
timezone (Nick is in Ireland, I am in California) and the latency of
requests responses was 24 hours
2) Since I did not want to reveal information about my site in a
public forum I sent it through private e-mail that was classified as
spam
3) Another user who had nothing to do with me intervened to the thread
with his issues and confused the situation

So I am wondering,

1. Is there a better way to get support? You know some application
(proably part of the dashboard) where you file a ticket, you describe
the issue and its priority and you get back a ticket number, you
have an option to keep it private between Google and you etc? In GAE
spirit develpers could even get a few tickets free per month and then
pay if they go over their ticket quotas :-)
2. If not, s something like that or even better than that in the
plans?
3. In the meantime, I described what I did to get support, should I
have done something in a different way?

Thanks

PS: In all three issuesthe problem was around indexes problems. There
seems to be a bug where if some index quota is exceeded the indexes
get in some weird state and Google personnel has to intervene.

[Tony Rowles]

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list

This is about your only other option, though of course it doesn't
solve the privacy issue or ensure timeliness. The lack of an
individual "trouble ticket" system like you describe is unusual for a
paid service. Fortunately the Google folks on this group are quite
responsive and helpful, but like you say, there's only so much they
can do.

[Stephen Mayer]

This seems like a fantastic idea ... I hope that Google has plans for
this type of support for application developers in the future. If
they want to avoid getting hammered with trivial issues they could
implement a pay-per-issue support feature to allow those of us who
have businesses that depends on GAE to report important issues and get
a response right away.

Stephen