Solutions for Cell Link Issues in Control Center

Stephanie Denier

Is anyone else experiencing issues with cell links either being stale (showing old data) or not working at all (red link indicators)? My organization uses a lot of cell linking in our blueprint and since August we have had issues with this occurring randomly throughout provisioned projects. We haven't gone a month without some projects experiencing these issues and we're having trouble keeping up.

It took weeks before our ticket was escalated to an engineer that was familiar with the problem, and the only offered solution was to provide the sheet IDs so that the Engineering team can "refresh" the sheets.

I have to keep a support ticket constantly open just so a Tier 3 engineer can help me within a day - otherwise who knows how long it would take to move past Tier 1 support.

We have a lot of teams that rely on accurate information in our blueprint and sometimes I can't wait and just manually fix the links myself.

Has anyone else come across this problem? Has anyone come up with a temporary solution?

Stephanie Denier

The only comment made from Smartsheet formally addressing the issue. No real solution available for customers who are forced to pay an increased price for a service that does not work properly.

"Sheet Links Issues 

Through Q4 of 2022, Smartsheet experienced issues with our ability to scale sheetlinks across larger customer solutions, and rolled out a new service to address this in November, deploying in early December 2022. This has solved all sheetlink scale related issues, but has introduced some undesirable behaviour in other scenarios leading the cell links to not populate / propagate correctly in the context of Control Center solutions, which can give the appearance of similar problems.

Issues Timeline / Explanation

Issue 1: Red arrows (broken links)

Previous impact: Customers were intermittently seeing red arrows (broken link indicators) after SCC provisioning/save as new actions.

Fix: We have deployed Our sheet link service fixes the broken link during the next propagation thus removing the red arrows.

Current impact: Arrows may intermittently be red on creation but will be fixed after the next propagation. We are making another change with a target date of 01/27 to fix this.

Issue 2: Delay, failed propagation, reordering

Previous impact: Any 2+ saves on the same cell in a sheet within 2 minutes had a high chance of being ordered incorrectly. This made it look like there was delay, failures, or reordering.

Fix: We have made a change that reduces the chances of this happening by 95%. 

New impact: Any 2+ saves on the same cell within 8 seconds currently still has a small chance of re-ordering. This issue is a temporary small error, with again a target date of 01/27 to fix this.

Resolution Path / Timeline

It’s worth noting these issues are not fundamental scale limitations with Smartsheet, but undesired behaviour exposed by the way we deal with our cell link writes in the old vs new services and some issues with our databases. There are also no “noisy neighbour” problems; healthy customers will not be affected by unhealthy customers. There are, as of now, no known issues that the manual refresh mitigation actioned by contacting Support will not fix until the automated fix is in place - if your solution is currently receiving daily issues, please let your support contact know and we will take proactive steps to mitigate any impact to your solution.

We always want to hear from you and work with you. If you want to talk to our Product and Engineering leadership about these issues, please reach out to your CSM or sales representative.

Additionally, please submit feedback requests in our product feedback request form - we read and consider every single piece of feedback. If you have immediate technical issues, please submit a Support ticket, or speak to your CSM / TAM."