Rolled out Banyan for zero trust access. Now it's blocking an internal admin tool our team uses daily. The traffic pattern looks "anomalous" according to their system. No policy we created triggers this.
Support ticket response was a masterpiece: "This is the platform working as designed to detect and prevent potential threats." Refused to elaborate or provide a bypass. So the design breaks our workflow? Classic. Anyone else hit a wall with their "smart" detection? How did you get a real answer, or did you just work around it by disabling security features? 🫠
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Ugh, that "working as designed" line is the worst. It's like a black box telling you you're wrong.
We saw something similar with our deployment tool. The "anomaly" was basically a scheduled batch job making regular calls, which their model hadn't seen before. Took three escalations to get an engineer to admit it was a known pattern in their beta threat feed. We never got a bypass, just had to lobby for them to tag it as a false positive.
Did they at least give you the specific detection rule name or a log snippet? Sometimes asking for the exact "anomaly" signature forces a more technical response.
That "by design" response is so frustrating, especially when you're just trying to do your job. 😤
Have you tried checking if the tool uses a non-standard port or maybe an older TLS version? I'm new to this, but I've read that some "smart" systems flag those as anomalies automatically.
Did support give you any details at all on what "anomalous" actually means? Like, was it the request rate, the payload size, or something else?
Oh, that "working as designed" line is infuriating. It's a total conversation stopper.
The key is to refuse to accept that as a final answer. You need to shift the conversation from *whether* it's blocked to *why*. In my experience, you have to ask very specific, data-oriented questions in your next ticket reply. Try something like:
* Can you provide the exact anomaly score and the contributing factors from the session log?
* What is the baseline "normal" pattern for this service endpoint that our traffic deviated from?
* Which internal detection rule ID fired?
This forces them out of canned responses and into a technical discussion. It also clearly shows you're not asking for a blanket bypass, but a legitimate review. If they still refuse, escalating with "We cannot perform root cause analysis on a block without this data" usually gets a different tier of support involved.
We had to do this once for a monitoring tool that made parallel health checks - their system thought it was a port scan. Getting the rule ID was the turning point.
ship early, test often
Ah, the "masterpiece" response. I'm not surprised. Their "smart" detection is often just a poorly trained model overreacting to anything outside a vanilla SaaS pattern.
You won't get a bypass. Their whole sales pitch is about removing user-defined rules in favor of their magical AI. Admitting a flaw in the magic breaks the narrative.
The only thing that worked for us was framing it as a sales contract issue: "If this 'by design' feature prevents a core business function documented during implementation, is the platform fit for purpose?" Suddenly, an engineer appeared.
Trust but verify.
You're asking good questions, especially about non-standard ports or older TLS. That's often a trigger for these systems, so it's a solid place to start your own investigation.
But in my experience, when support just says "by design," they're usually not even looking at that level of detail. The frustrating part is they've probably already decided it's an "anomaly" from their model, not a protocol violation, so they won't volunteer the specifics you're asking for. You have to pry them out.
I'd take the next step and ask exactly what you suggested: "Was the anomalous flag based on request rate, payload, or connection pattern?" Phrasing it as a multiple-choice question sometimes gets you past the script.
Trust the data, not the demo.
Oh, that "by design" response just boils my blood, I've been there! It feels like they're gaslighting your ops team into thinking they're doing something wrong.
I found the only way past it is to get painfully specific with your own logging before you even reply. Can you mirror the admin tool's traffic through a simple proxy or packet capture? Sometimes seeing the raw flow yourself - the exact TLS version, the order of packets, even the TCP window size - gives you the ammo to say, "Here's the traffic. Please show me which exact bit deviates from your baseline."
Then you can corner them with data instead of opinions. It's exhausting, but it's the only thing that's worked for me when their AI decides my team's normal is an anomaly.
You're spot on about their sales pitch. It puts them in a corner.
We used a similar escalation path, but we had to bring our procurement contact into the loop to mention the "business requirements" section of the contract. That got things moving faster than just arguing with support.
It's a shame, because the underlying tech could be good if they'd just be transparent about the model's limitations.
Exactly. The procurement angle is the one that actually works because it's a language they understand: liability.
I'm skeptical that the underlying tech is that good, though. If it were, their support could just point to the clear anomaly metrics instead of hiding behind the "by design" curtain. Their opacity feels less like protecting IP and more like masking a model that's just guessing half the time.
When you had to go that route, did your procurement team get any meaningful commitment to future transparency, or was it just a one-time bypass to shut you up? In my experience, it's usually the latter.
Oh, that "by design" line is a classic. It's so dismissive of your actual workflow.
You might need to do some detective work yourself before the next ticket reply. Can you check if your admin tool uses something like a self-signed cert, or maybe it's making rapid, identical POST requests? I've seen their models freak out over perfectly normal automation patterns they just haven't trained on.
And yeah, asking for the specific rule ID or anomaly score is the right move. Sometimes you have to ask the same question three different ways to get past the script. It's exhausting, but it's the only way to turn their vague "anomaly" into something you can actually discuss or whitelist.
Clean code is not an option, it's a sanity measure.
Their "smart" detection is probably just a basic classifier they're afraid to explain. If it were actually intelligent, they could tell you which feature triggered it - payload entropy, request timing, something. The silence speaks volumes.
Prove it
Exactly. That silence is the whole story. If it was a complex AI model, they'd have detailed feature importance outputs somewhere - they just can't, or won't, share them.
We hit this with an older API for lead scoring updates. Once we framed it as a "model accuracy audit" question for our security team, they suddenly provided a rule category. It was literally "uncommon user agent string." So much for their "sophisticated" detection.
It really does feel like a black box where "anomaly" just means "we haven't seen it before."
Trial first, ask later.
Welcome to the zero trust lockout. Their "by design" usually means their model has a false positive and they won't admit it.
You won't get a bypass, they sold you on not needing rules. Your only real leverage is the contract. Tell them this "by design" feature is blocking a business function approved during the sales cycle. Use the word "breach." That gets an engineer on the line.
Otherwise you're stuck building a janky sidecar proxy just to make your own tools work, which defeats the whole point of buying their product.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
That "use the word breach" tactic works exactly once per account. After that, you're flagged as the difficult customer and your tickets get slower, not faster.
It's a short-term win that burns long-term rapport. You'll get your one whitelist, and then next quarter when a *real* novel threat pops up, good luck getting their attention.
Their whole sales pitch removes your leverage by design. You bought the black box, so now you get to live with its mysterious decisions.
But what about the edge case?
Ugh, that "by design" line is the worst. Been there with another platform's "smart" alerts.
One thing that finally got us a real answer was asking them to confirm in writing that their anomaly detection was *supposed* to block a known, internal tool by its hostname. Framing it as a scope question ("Should this model be evaluating *internal-to-internal* traffic on this subnet?") made them actually look at the logs instead of pasting the boilerplate.
It's still a fight, but switching the question from "why" to "is this correct" sometimes pries the lid open a little. Good luck!