TAC Support Response Time

[shanil420]

Dear Everyone,

I work for a SMB security solution provider company in Sri Lanka. Since last year our company has been selling Checkpoint products to our customers.

I have worked with many vendors throughout my career for last 8 years & everytime I face with an unresolvable issue from our end or our local distributor support team, We can always seek support from the direct product vendor. 

We have faced few issues on our customer sites and on every occasion,even after our local distributor him self escaleted the issue to the TAC team seeking support, they usually take around a week to respond. One of my friend who works for another partner company, who also provides checkpoint solutions said to me that he still has a opened ticket without an solution for more than 04 months.

One of our customer who is a Group of company (Logistic & shipping) who have purchased the 24*7 support who has a mission critical environment, even when they raise an ticket no one is even simply reply to the support requested email.

Since this community  has been replying to me within seconds for the questions i've raised everytime, I seek your experince with Checkpoint TAC team on resolving issues.

Please let me know what are the steps you guys take when you face an error on corporate environment and how you are resolving the unknown errors.

Thank you.

[G_W_Albrecht]

First: I never had such a late response at all ! If you need very quick response for an issue with high or critical severity, phoning TAC to open SR# and having a RAS to customers sytems asap is the way to go. That some cases can take very long is just a fact - i had one that even took 3/4 of a year until the issue was resolved 😉 But that was because of this issues nature, not CPs fault.

If you need to expedite the SR#, you can:

- do a Management Escalation and give a good reason for it

- ask your local CP SE for help to get more resources for TAC to resolve this customers case

[_Val_]

Hi Shanil, this cannot be true. Please send me one of the SRs via a private message, so we can investigate. I will also ask the relevant team to look into your cases.

[_Val_]

Hi @shanil420 I triple-checked and did not find a single support request opened by you. Do you have a Co-Op support agreement? Please provide me those SRs so we can get to the bottom of this.  

[Martijn]

Shanil,

Provide as much information as you can when opening a case with TAC. So get cpinfo files, log files, network traces, screenshots and explain the issue as best as you can. Sending this amount of information is good, but it takes some time for the support engineer to investigate all that information. That's the way it is.

I always informs support what type of customer we are talking about. TAC engineers typically jump into problem solving mode and sometimes forget the environment in which the systems are running. Sometimes maintenance windows are needed to perform some troubleshooting tasks like debugging.

As mention before. When opening a high severity case, make a phone call after opening the SR.

Another thing I always do is make my expectations clear. When I update a case with a debug output for example, I understand TAC needs some time to investigates that information. But I always ask to give me an update in four days for example. And explain why. 

When escalating a case, do not just click the Escalate button on the support website, but send an email to the escalation managers. Better, pick up the phone and make a phone call telling them you escalated the case.

In the rare cases we do feel no progress is being made, we involve the local Check Point office to assist us.

In the past it was firewall and VPN, but cyber security products (Check Point included) are getting more complex and solving issues takes more time. Especially when dealing with complex issues and lot of data being send to TAC.

Maybe the procedure for escalating a case is usefull.

Check Point TAC Support Escalation Path - Check Point Software

Good luck,
Martijn

[the_rock]

I would say your best bet to notify your local Sales person, if you had already escalated the case online.

Andy