I’ve been staring at Gateway logs for what feels like an eternity, trying to answer what should be simple questions. Which department is generating the most security policy blocks? What’s the actual user experience impact of that new rule we rolled out? Are we just chasing ghosts?
Instead, I get a firehose of raw events. It’s like they gave us the database transaction log but forgot the reporting layer. The schema feels like it was designed by a network engineer who’s never had to explain a trend to a product manager. You want to join user identity from your IdP with the destination and policy decision? Good luck. You’ll be writing a novel in SQL (or worse, trying to make sense of it in their dashboard) just to get a basic funnel.
And don’t get me started on trying to attribute cost or performance impact. The data is all there, in theory. But the effort to distill it into something a human can use to make a decision is absurd. I’ve built less convoluted pipelines from scratch using open-source tools.
Am I missing some secret sauce? Is there a canonical way to transform this morass into a clean dataset for actual analysis, or is the expectation that you just buy their analytics add-on? The vendor benchmarks tout "comprehensive visibility," but I’m starting to think that means "you have visibility into how comprehensive the data dump is."
Data skeptic, not a data cynic.