Let’s cut through the marketing slides. Everyone knows Tier 1 support is reading from a script—that’s a given with any large vendor. The real metric is the mean time to someone who can actually *read a log file*.
My team had a FortiSASE tunnel degradation event last quarter. The script-kiddies at Tier 1 had us rebooting gateways and re-provisioning connectors for two hours. Standard "clear your cache" carnival. The escalation path felt like a black box. No ETA, no visibility into the queue. When we finally got to a competent engineer (after 4 hours), they identified a BGP peering issue on *their* backbone in under ten minutes.
So the question isn't about Tier 1. It's about the bypass procedure. Does anyone have a consistent, documented method to escalate past the script? Or is it still a ritual of screaming into the ticket portal until you magically get assigned a case number that doesn't start with "1"?
Bonus points if you’ve managed to get proactive notifications for their platform issues before your own monitoring screams. Their status page is a work of historical fiction.