Sophos Support Dissapointment

Hi All,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused. We always intend to provide our best services in every aspect. Whenever you have a poor experience with our phone support, delayed responses from Support for days or any case is not worked upon especially when the priority of the case is critical; you can always reach us through twitter handle and #tag us on @SophosSupport. We will make sure the cases are escalated and an engineer reaches you on priority. 

We assure our concentration on Community forum and we try to reach out as many queries and questions raised here. We have dedicated product experts on this regards to suffice the attention required on the posts.

Thank you for the patience.

Hi All,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused. We always intend to provide our best services in every aspect. Whenever you have a poor experience with our phone support, delayed responses from Support for days or any case is not worked upon especially when the priority of the case is critical; you can always reach us through twitter handle and #tag us on @SophosSupport. We will make sure the cases are escalated and an engineer reaches you on priority. 

We assure our concentration on Community forum and we try to reach out as many queries and questions raised here. We have dedicated product experts on this regards to suffice the attention required on the posts.

Thank you for the patience.

Hi Sachin,

Thank you for the response but unfortunately it's way too late.

Understand that Sophos UTM products (or Astaro as I still call them) integrate too many mission critical aspects of the business nowadays.

We are running Webproxy with SSO, Mail proxy with 10+ domains, 7 VPNs, 20+ SSL VPN Users, 10 Wifi APs with 3 wifi networks, 2 public internet connections with Load Balancing and 3 physically separated internal networks... not to mention the NAT rules, IPS, Advanced protection... so on...

When one of these services fail, in the eyes of the customer, it's the same as all services failing. This is why we have HA and 2 ASG220 units....

Normally we are notified when a problem occurs and there is a reasonable notification message or log file to derive the cause of the issue and a quick search in the forums finds us an answer...

But when HA fails (but doesn't indicate) and causes the internal DB to fail on a particular unit (in this case the mail proxy) there is still, to date, no notification or log to help with this... there is no webadmin function to rebuild the db or monitor the db systems...

There is no emergency mail relay for notifications.... daily reports and wifi passwords stop... in general... it disrupts the business...

Then we are but at the mercy of Sophos support to assist us and troubleshoot this... and there is no response for days and when there is, we are told that going to training is more important than fixing our issues and then finally that we are in contact with the wrong support team in the wrong timezone...

Sorry, but you have the customer details, you know where we are, you have our history and you know we have had this problem before, you should be able to read the detail within 30mins (max 1hr) and then pick up the phone and call us...

Maybe I am asking too much but in the current age of internet and things, where we have personalized, focused and targeted marketing, one would think that support should also be up to the same speed or something close.

Anyhow, I now know to contact the Australian Office and ask for Tier 2 support for the future. Hopefully next time support will be much better.

If I can share anything with anyone from what I have learnt here, it is that, open a support case now and ask who/where you should contact for Tier 2 support in your area... so that when you actually need support you know where to contact and HOW to contact them.

BTW, in the end, I did what I had to do last time and spend 4-5 hours performing a complete re-install and restore of both units.

I'm now going to schedule a quarterly re-install to avoid these issues.

Sachin, I will not be using my personal Twitter account to chase up your support staff regarding a work issue.

Don't use your "personal" Twitter account then. 

I don't intend to.

And that's my point - I shouldn't have to resort to chasing on Twitter when an email should suffice.