Service Level Agreement

Last Updated: June 15, 2023

If you purchased CIQ support before June 15, 2023, you can find our older SLA here: Legacy SLA

Definitions

• “Claim” means a claim submitted by Customer to Ctrl IQ pursuant to these SLA.
• “Incident” means any set of circumstances resulting in an observable or reproducible degradation or impairment of the Subscribed Services.
• "Entitlement" Equates to the number of individuals who can open tickets when purchased by the person or per 100 nodes.
• Severity 1 “Urgent Issue” means any issue and/or problem in which the critical production systems of the Subscribed Services are unavailable, and customers are unable to perform core business functions. 
• Severity 2 “High Priority Issue” means any issue and/or problem in which the Subscribed Services are severely impacted and business functions are significantly impaired, though core functions remain operational.
• Severity 3 “Normal Priority Issue” means any non-urgent issue and/or problem that, while potentially impacting the Subscribed Services, does not prevent Customer’s use of the Subscribed Services in any material way and there is no significant loss of productivity.
• Severity 4 “Low Priority Issue” means any non-urgent requests by Customer related to the Subscribed Services or Ctrl IQ’s products or services generally. For example, purely informational requests, reports, usage questions, clarifications regarding documentation, or any feature enhancement suggestions.

Escalation Efforts Definition

• User: Questions, usability, installation, integration, pointing to existing documentation, videos, use cases, how-to recipe’s.
• System Admin: Configuration/management, service support, infrastructure, debugging, coordinating with upstream outside projects for bug resolution.
• Security: Identification, verification, and diligence of security-related issues and subsequent resolution which could be configurations, updates, and code patches for supported packages. 
• Engineering/Development: Advanced debugging, patching, pulling, and merge requests with upstream projects.

Access to Support

• Ctrl IQ will provide the customer with access to an online customer support center where Customer may: (i) open a Claim; (ii) send Ctrl IQ information to aid in the resolution of any issues or problems with the Subscribed Services; (iii) check on the status of open Claims; (iv) track any correspondence between Customer and Ctrl IQ support engineers; and (v) access other informational resources to resolve issues with the Subscribed Services.
• Ctrl IQ will make available a dedicated team of support engineers, to whom the customer may report and resolve potential issues through self-help, phone, tickets, email & chat.
• For security reasons, only the customer’s authorized users may submit Claims to Ctrl IQ.

Managing Reported Issues/Tickets

For general application problems get details including:

• Customer name and contact information
• The description of the problem
• Steps to reproduce
• Product version
• Impact on customer’s work
• Components
• URL/API
• Stack trace/error logs
• Screenshots you can obtain

Prioritizing Problems and Requests

When there are a number of problems to be solved, they need to be prioritized according to how critical they are. The support staff will need to ask questions to find out the specific problem and cause, so they can effectively assign it a priority level.

Ticket Classification

CIQ recognizes four different classifications of contacts that the customer may initiate:

• Incident/Issue/Bug: An Incident is defined as any event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes an interruption to, or a reduction in quality of that service.
• Service Request: A Service Request is defined as a request for a new or altered service and includes such things as account setup, and “how-to” instructions.
• Feature Request: An Enhancement Request is defined as a request for new or modified functionality.
• Change Request: A request to apply some form of change to the environment such as an upgrade to a newer software build, configuration change, etc.

Support Ticket Response Stages

For clarity, the following definitions will pertain to the 3 “stages” of a ticket’s life:

• Acknowledge: CIQ’s response to a customer that an issue has been reported and received.
• Response: CIQ’s evaluation of the issue that has been reported and a preliminary course (plan) of corrective action.
• Solution: CIQ’s implementation of the resolution to the reported issue will be deployed at the next mutually agreed upon deployment date within the schedule.

Ticket Status Key

The below key will help you understand what to mark each ticket status as during the life cycle of driving the ticket to resolution.

• Waiting for Support: this item is awaiting action from support. This could be either new or existing tickets, as handling goes back and forth between engineering and support.
• In Progress: this item is being worked on currently by support.
• Waiting for Customer: awaiting additional details, artifacts, or confirmation of issue resolution from customer.
• Pending: pending any external requirements to address the issue.
• Waiting for Fix: this indicates that Engineering is working on the issue and will provide a fix. This status indicates support is waiting on a fix. This is something I filter by and look for as an indication that it has been reviewed by engineering and is being worked on.
• Won’t Fix: indicates Engineering determined not a legitimate bug or declined to change the item as it’s by design.
• Resolved: issue has been resolved/closed.

Knowledge Base Management

Knowledge Base articles help customers and Support Engineers solve known problems more efficiently. They not only reduce the learning curve and time to resolution of an issue for a new Support Engineer but can also aid in deflecting tickets when customers try to submit a ticket. Creating a robust knowledge base is beneficial to both customers and the support team.

Topics can range from managing and maintaining a CIQ supported product to troubleshooting common issues with specific products. Articles are reviewed at regular quarter intervals and a full review at the end of the year to ensure they are still relevant and accurate.

* Capitalized terms not defined in this Ctrl IQ Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) have the meanings set forth in the Ctrl IQ Master Subscription Agreement, between Ctrl IQ, Inc. (“Ctrl IQ”) and the customer.