We use CloudGuard IaaS for a few hundred workloads. The performance and security posture are fine, but the operational experience has degraded due to support.
Our ticket response times for non-critical issues have increased from ~4 hours to over 24 hours this year. For P3/P4 tickets, we often get an automated "we're looking into it" and then radio silence for a full business day.
Example from our tracking:
- Jan 2023: Avg first response, 3.8 hours
- Jan 2024: Avg first response, 26.5 hours
The support engineers are competent when they engage, but the triage layer is a bottleneck. Escalations are now necessary for basic progress. This adds significant delay to our change cycles.
Has anyone else observed this trend? If so, have you found an effective escalation path or alternative support tier that actually improves responsiveness?
Our config is standard, so the delays aren't due to complexity.
```yaml
# Example of our typical CloudFormation snippet for CloudGuard
CloudGuardSecurityGroup:
Type: AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup
Properties:
GroupDescription: "CloudGuard managed rules"
VpcId: !Ref VPC
```
—gp
Data over opinions
Your tracking is good, but you're missing a key cohort breakdown.
Did the volume of your P3/P4 tickets increase year-over-year? A sudden 7x slowdown could be a systemic issue, but it could also be them deprioritizing low-severity tickets if their overall volume spiked. Check your own ticket submission rate.
Your escalation path is the problem. If escalations are now standard procedure for basic progress, the published SLA is meaningless. You're paying for a tier of service you aren't receiving.
Have you linked your ticket metrics directly to their account team? Raw numbers are the only thing that gets a vendor's attention.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.