Help: Banyan blocks a critical internal tool and support says 'by design'.

They're not wrong about escalating past frontline support, but quantifying the business cost is what actually gets traction. "Team is blocked" is a Tuesday for them. "This is costing $2k/hour" gets a bridge call scheduled.

Your admin tool might be triggering a simple heuristic, like a fixed interval polling loop or an uncommon user agent. Without the raw logs, you're just poking in the dark. Demand those logs. If they can't provide them, you've got a compliance problem, not a technical one.

You're right to be frustrated with that response. It's a deflection that prevents meaningful troubleshooting. When I've encountered similar "smart detection" blocks, the most effective path wasn't arguing about the model, but forcing a procedural bypass.

Instead of asking them to explain the anomaly, submit a formal request to have the specific source IP or service account for your admin tool added to a verified allow list *outside* the anomaly detection engine. Frame it as a temporary measure while they investigate. Their willingness or refusal to accommodate this tells you everything about whether their "design" includes operational flexibility for legitimate business tools. If they won't, you're dealing with a rigid system, not a security partner.

Your experience with the "too regular" polling interval is a textbook example of why anomaly detection needs context. It's essentially punishing predictable, legitimate automation.

> after pushing back three times, they finally admitted

This delay is telling. In my own tests, I've found that consistent polling intervals often produce a high anomaly score on the "periodicity" or "burstiness" feature, but that score should be weighted against other factors like source identity and destination. If their model can't incorporate service account context, it's fundamentally flawed for enterprise use.

Escalating to a security engineer is the correct step, but the goal shouldn't just be an explanation. It should be to get the specific feature weightings for that rule. If they can't share that, you're dealing with an opaque system you'll have to work around permanently.

You're absolutely right about asking for the rule ID or anomaly score. I've found that when you ask for a "transaction ID" or "model decision ID" instead of just an "anomaly score," it sometimes trips a different part of their script and they actually pull up the right dashboard.

The self-signed cert theory is a good one, too. That's tripped up more than one of our internal dashboards. Sometimes it's not even the cert itself, but the tool using an older cipher suite that gets flagged as 'weak' and therefore suspicious.

Oh man, that "working as designed" line is the worst. Had a similar thing with a different vendor where our backup scripts got flagged. It turned out to be the connection duration - the model was trained on short human sessions, not a 300-second cron job. Maybe your admin tool has a similar steady pattern that looks weird to their system?

Escalating past first-line support as others said is the only way. And definitely ask for the specific rule ID or feature that triggered it. If they can't tell you, how can you ever trust it?

Good luck, this stuff is so stressful when you're just trying to do your job.

That initial "working as designed" response is so disheartening, especially when you're just trying to get a tool unblocked. I've been in a similar spot with inventory sync tools getting flagged. The advice about escalating to a TAM or solutions architect is solid, but before you get there, have you checked the user agent string or API path the admin tool is using? I once spent days troubleshooting only to find our internal tool was identifying itself with a developer build string that their system had never seen before, and it flagged the entire user agent as an outlier. It might be something simple like that buried in the headers.

That's a great point about the user agent string. It's such a small detail that can cause a huge headache. I've seen similar issues where a tool's default UA gets flagged simply because it's unique or unknown to their threat database.

It's a double-edged sword, though. While it might be the simple fix, it also highlights a model that's too brittle if a single, non-malicious header field can cause a full block. If you can change the UA and it works, that's a relief but also a bit concerning for what else might trigger a false positive down the line.