(Smoothwall support long response times for critical issues)

[Sheridan]

I'm about to ditch Smoothwall as well - tickets take ages to get resolved, by the time I get any kind of reply I've had to find a workaround anyway

 

Sophos XG looks like the way to go

[Lightspeed_Shaun]

Hi all,

 

I'd be happy to meet and discuss your outstanding requirements.

 

Feel free to drop me an email to discuss how the Lightspeed Systems solutions suite can help filter and protect your students -

[email protected]

 

In the mean time please see our

United Learning Trust | Case Study

and solution overview below:

 

Lightspeed Filter

 

Lightspeed Alert (Safeguarding)

 

I look forward to connecting.

 

Shaun Phillips

Regional Sales Director

DDI:

020 4534 5282

www.lightspeedsystems.com

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by Lightspeed_Shaun

[sippo]

Anyone else having issues with Smoothwall. Just trying to contact my account contact takes forever.

[howartp]

Yes, we opened ticket on 15th April, marked as Urgent, and CC'd to Lee and Alison, as we were under ongoing DDOS attacks. (Lee is service manager, not sure who Alison is).

 

4 days later I nudged my account manager and had a phone call from Alan within the hour.

 

Alan later closed the ticket with my consent and opened a new Normal priority ticket for a related issue.

 

It's 12 days since I heard from him despite me providing three updates 9 days ago.

 

Ticket IDs 308947 and 309319 if anyone from Smoothwall is watching.

 

Hi 'howartp'

 

I am the Service Desk Team Leader at Smoothwall.

 

I've taken a look at those tickets for you and I will get the engineer to reach out to you.

 

Many Thanks

Ashleigh Bulmer

 

Thanks for the hint about contacting the CEO; I've just done so.

 

I contacted my account manager about the previous ticket and got a pretty quick response but I shouldn't have to keep chasing.

 

Peter

 

Anyone else having issues with Smoothwall. Just trying to contact my account contact takes forever.

Erm... yep!

[Norphy]

I raised a ticket on the 24th May. The first I heard from an engineer was on the 10th June. The only contact I had from Smoothwall in the three weeks between was an automated email from them saying "Sorry, we'll assign an engineer to you as soon as possible".

 

I was this --><-- close to emailing my account manager to have a good whinge but I got an email from an engineer just as I was doing so, who in fairness was very good once he was looking at the issue.

 

I don't think there's an issue with the quality of the care that Smoothwall technical support provides once they get around to you but there sure are problems with response times. Three weeks to get a response is downright unacceptable.

[ITGURU]

Support definitely downhill - our box froze and i rebooted it as we had no internet which restored access. when logged ticket at the time they said if I've rebooted it then they can't get any logs off it but when it froze couldnt do anything. 2 weeks later i get asked to provide them with a remote session and told its a one off like a blue screen of death, so if i didn't restart it we'd have been 2 weeks without internet! End of renewal we shall be leaving smoothwall.

[disco_samurai]

Yup same here, I've had a ticket open since February that the engineer tried to fix and just seems to have given up on, not responding to requests for updates. Had another ticket open for 2 weeks about locking down a VPN app and when I got a response from an engineer he just emailed me a knowledge base article on 'How to Unblock a Website'... very useful.

Will be looking at moving away from Smoothwall when our renewal runs out.

[Driftingashore]

Just as a counter to all the negatives, we had a critical issue after installing Leeds 48 yesterday. It was about an hour after calling support before an engineer was available, but the issue was resolved quite quickly afterwards, and a replacement HD is being sent over as they suspect a dodgy disk was the root cause. I'd consider the response pretty good.

[MartinT]

We have an unstable UTM1000 with the red light constantly on. I raised a ticket on 17 June with no response yet. Despite promises of a call from our account manager, we've never heard from her. I have now written to Georg Ell in a desperate attempt at some action. The Smoothwall is our single point of failure and it's becoming a real pain and causing a lot of upset among the staff.

[slugshead]

Had a ticket open a week now, not a single response.

 

In the past I've called support around midnight and got through the US teams, issues resolved within 30 minutes... (done this a few times because the UK response times are shocking)

[MartinT]

Well, that seemed to work. After e-mailing the CEO we got an immediate response and an engineer from the US remoted into our Smoothwall within minutes.

 

We have a failed HD. They are sending a replacement and will then rebuild the software RAID once we've replaced the drive.

[Norphy]

It would be nice to get a response from Smoothwall about this. There are clearly a lot of dissatisfied customers here and at least two people who have categorically stated that they're moving to an alternative solution because support times are so slow. People shouldn't have to be contacting their account managers or the damned CEO of the company just to get some support. It would be nice to think that we're not peeing in the wind here.

 

As I said before, once you get an engineer, they're generally very good (Alex Kahn is the one who usually gets me and I've always been happy with his help) but actually getting a response to a simple ticket shouldn't take weeks.

 

Is @tom_newton still working for them?

Edited June 29, 2021 by Norphy

[MartinT]

Alan Bulmer has been good in the past. I think Tom is still working for them but we haven't spoken since BETT 2019.

 

The engineer today, Tao Liu, was very helpful.

[kjadams]

Tao Liu also help me Monday following a failed HDD/corrupt system that failed to boot.

 

Top marks.

[TechMonkey]

This is the issue though, the engineers when you speak to them are top notch. But if you can't get to them it is pointless. I am losing my positivity about it all having had our failover die again after an update and been waiting nearly 2 weeks for anything beyond automated replies. I shouldn't have to chase, get my account manger to chase or email the CEO, for every ticket.

[ibpalle]

This is the issue though, the engineers when you speak to them are top notch. But if you can't get to them it is pointless. I am losing my positivity about it all having had our failover die again after an update and been waiting nearly 2 weeks for anything beyond automated replies. I shouldn't have to chase, get my account manger to chase or email the CEO, for every ticket.

 

No you should not. We are carrying a big backlog at the moment which is why chasing for ticket response can be needed. One consequence is that a lot of our tickets are 3-4 word P1 mails and technically speaking not a P1 issue. Each one of those needs sorting in turn and there's no way of knowing if it will take 20 minutes or the full day.

 

I know all here do provide good descriptions when they submit cases so likely preaching to the choir here when I say that they help immensely. Gives us a good idea on what to expect and thus makes it easier to plan for.

 

We are taking steps, new people coming in and some new processes and methods being introduced. The cloud backup is one that should help immensely with restoring failed systems - btw, the cloud backup was introduced on Leeds-45.

 

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020722900

 

Hopefully in a month or two we will start seeing improvements on the backlog - until then, unfortunately keep chasing the important tickets and do check out our knowledge base too - you never know. Feedback to account managers/Support admins and here, we do read everything. Also - please be nice to the supporters

[kirbster73]

No you should not. We are carrying a big backlog at the moment which is why chasing for ticket response can be needed. One consequence is that a lot of our tickets are 3-4 word P1 mails and technically speaking not a P1 issue. Each one of those needs sorting in turn and there's no way of knowing if it will take 20 minutes or the full day.

 

I know all here do provide good descriptions when they submit cases so likely preaching to the choir here when I say that they help immensely. Gives us a good idea on what to expect and thus makes it easier to plan for.

 

We are taking steps, new people coming in and some new processes and methods being introduced. The cloud backup is one that should help immensely with restoring failed systems - btw, the cloud backup was introduced on Leeds-45.

 

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020722900

 

Hopefully in a month or two we will start seeing improvements on the backlog - until then, unfortunately keep chasing the important tickets and do check out our knowledge base too - you never know. Feedback to account managers/Support admins and here, we do read everything. Also - please be nice to the supporters

 

Hi,

 

We’ve been with smoothwall now for coming up to three years. Whilst I like the product, the support is and has been appalling for the entire length of time we’ve been with you. To be fair, we’ve heard this for the las three years and it’s the same old story, we’re recruiting more people, changing our processes etc. I wonder why you always seem so short of support staff!

[ITGURU]

As a MAT of 3 schools, starting with Censornet , one with Lightspeed and one with Smoothwall, all will eventually be on Censornet. Lightspeed was terrible, Smoothwalls support was awful 2 weeks to wait for support of a frozen box and told not to reboot it because the wouldnt be able to get the logs off it. Well if its frozen course you cant and don't want me to reboot it for 2 weeks?! Joke! Lightspeed box HDD failed one day just out the blue, took down site-site access as inline, but luckily was in the process of implementing censornet.

 

In-Line devices no longer suitable for us with site-site connections, box dies, no site to site. Censornet has a local gateway (VM) and all filtering is cloud based. It now means we can have 100% uptime between sites and any internet issues only affect the internet. If the VM has issues, we still have site to site WAN connectivity just no internet but it's never failed us and can have as many vm's as you want for redundancy/load balancing at no extra cost.

 

With censornet I get instant live chat/support on their website, they'll always work on the issue straight away, direct contact with technical manager, and account managers work closely with CensorNet. One weekend the filter failed due to an ssl certificate issue on a Saturday morning. By saturday afternoon i had a response and a fix from both account manager and support!

 

check out Cloud Security Platform | Cloud Security | Censornet

[tom_newton]

Alan Bulmer has been good in the past. I think Tom is still working for them but we haven't spoken since BETT 2019.

 

The engineer today, Tao Liu, was very helpful.

 

I'm still here - just less active on Edugeek