Smoothwall Monitor delays

[synaesthesia]

Is anyone else getting large delays on reports from Smoothwall Monitor?

Up until last month the longest delay we ever had on any report was end of the same day. Over the last couple of weeks, we've literally had a week's delay on one report, 5 days on another, 2 days on another. For such an expensive service, this seems to be very problematic.

Their reasoning so far has been "it wasn't relating to a child and wasn't a high priority event at only a level 3", however the others were relating to children. Also only level 3, but I don't hold out much hope for their triaging recently. Had quite a few reports come in at level 2 that should have been 3 and therefore automatically going through to CPOMS.

Also hitting another issue I'm raising with them regarding the integration - when it does go to CPOMS it only shows the time and date of when the event was raised, not when it actually happened. Our DSL felt silly going stomping into a classroom to find the student involved not anywhere near a computer and hasn't been for 2 days!

[whartomt01]

Yes the same.

 

We had a level 4 that came 8 days late. But usually level 3 with the same reasoning.

We are told things should be back to normal next week. I'm not sure if it's a generic response we received about the recent issues. We will see!

[tom_newton]

Re: the CPOMs integration getting time of alert, rather than time of incident - thats going to be fixed soonish, I am told. Understand how that might be frustrating.

 

We have delays at the minute - I'm going to defer to a more formal response, rather than my usual off the cuff responses on here, this is a measure of how seriously we take this.  

 

 

[synaesthesia]

Ah that's good to know, thanks. I wasn't sure if I needed to speak to CPOMS or Smoothwall, so raised a case on both sides just to cover all bases. (Half expected it to be something CPOMS needed to do to pull the correct field). For the time being we're having to get them to log into Monitor and check manually, unfortunately another time-taking step for their ever increasing workloads

 

I'm still quite in awe at how Monitor works in terms of man-power so on the assumption that staffing might be an issue on top of workload. Have always said that without Monitor we'd need to have a full time member of staff on safeguarding.

[tom_newton]

We have experienced some temporary delays on lower severity categories. But normal service will resume as of tomorrow.  The reason for the delays is two fold. Firstly, AI has increased both the volume of complex alerts and the time our moderators need to assess them. Added to this, we are deploying a new, higher-sensitivity rules engine to identify a broader range of risks (including those originating from AI) with greater accuracy. Both factors have driven a rise in alerts, which in turn has created some temporary delays while our capacity scales to meet demand. Critical alerts continue to be handled with urgency and have not been affected.  And all level 5 phone calls are being made as soon as the risk is identified, as normal. We have significantly expanded our moderation team and recruitment is actively ongoing. However, this is specialist work and recruiting the right individuals and training them to the standard required takes time. Standards in human review are critical and we will not compromise on this. We expect to see a return to normal service by Thursday 21st May. 

 

Happy to answer any other questions where possible.
 

[MYK-IT]

17 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Ah that's good to know, thanks. I wasn't sure if I needed to speak to CPOMS or Smoothwall, so raised a case on both sides just to cover all bases. (Half expected it to be something CPOMS needed to do to pull the correct field). For the time being we're having to get them to log into Monitor and check manually, unfortunately another time-taking step for their ever increasing workloads

 

I'm still quite in awe at how Monitor works in terms of man-power so on the assumption that staffing might be an issue on top of workload. Have always said that without Monitor we'd need to have a full time member of staff on safeguarding.

 

Following this thread, as although we've had the sales-pitch / demo of Smoothwall Monitor, always good to know and be aware of the actual end-user experience.  Both good and bad. Especially as it is effectively a key-logger (yes, i know it does more than that) intrigued how a DPIA process would go... (e.g. usernames, passwords, PII data captured etc).

[tom_newton]

I think the fact that folks notice when there are delays is indicative of the fact that normally, there simply aren't!

 

We also have some pretty rigorous tooling to prevent capture of pii. 

[synaesthesia]

DPIA for us was quite simple, very nearly a mirror copy of Impero as it works in very much the same way. Only real difference is that the data is then going external and processed by said external company, so the risk levels rise appropriately.  Not unlike an MSP who might support a school remotely perhaps even outside of an IT scope - data protection for example.

 

Full transparency, this is the first real issue we've had with Monitor. We had previous problems relating to integrations but support was always spot on and it got resolved quickly, and even as a non safeguarding person, I think it's worth every penny.

 

@tom_newton - it took me too long to wonder why you're trying to avoid capturing 3.1415926....  Been dealing with GDPR this morning too so it shouldn't have been difficult to understand!

Edited May 20 by synaesthesia

[tom_newton]

Haha, we probably would throw that away anyway (very few "long numbers" are actually predictive of... anything really, and some of them are credit cards, social security, bank deets, etc, so we bin a lot of that sort of data!)

[tom_newton]

As promised things are back to normal: as of this morning there was nothing older than 22 minutes in all bar one category.

[synaesthesia]

Thanks Tom, much appreciated.  I don't think our DSL's appreciated the initial reply from our support call 2 days ago as it was a bit dismissive but the last one plus your reassurance has them happy

[tom_newton]

In fairness we were a bit slow in making sure everyone had the right response to give people, largely because we wanted to know the facts. In the spirit of "never waste a good emergency", this surge of captures has definitely lead to some great improvements in our process already