Chef Support Service Level Agreements

January 12, 2015 (view archived version)

The purpose of this document is to outline the support included in your Chef Software subscription. There are three support options available: Chef Standard, Chef Premium, and Chef Customer Success Support.

1. CHEF STANDARD SUBSCRIPTION SUPPORT:Chef makes its team available to support you within specified support hours. The Standard Subscription Support provides you basic support and lets you know you’re not alone.

   1. Service Level Agreement (SLA)
      

      Severity	Response Time	Submission Method
      1	60 minutes 6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system
      2	3 Hours 6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system
      3	24 Hours 6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system or email
      4	No SLA	Web-based ticketing system or email

   2. PLEASE NOTE: All tickets submitted by email will be classified as Severity 3 by default. Severity 4 issues are product feature requests and will be tracked in order to provide updates to customers but do not have a response SLA associated with them.
   3. The web interface at https://www.chef.io/support/tickets is the best method of submitting tickets to the Chef support team. From this interface, Customers may submit any severity level ticket, as well as view previously submitted tickets. To email a ticket, simply send an email to support@chef.io, and a new ticket will be generated.

2. CHEF PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION SUPPORT:If you are leveraging Chef for mission critical systems and need a higher level of support, then Chef Premium Subscription Support is the best choice for you. Chef provides a team of dedicated professionals to ensure that you receive support for mission critical problems 24x7x365.

   The following table is our Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Chef Premium Subscription Support:

   1. Service Level Agreement (SLA)
      

      Severity	Response Time	Submission Method
      1	30 minutes 24×7 Every day	Web-based ticketing system
      2	1 Hour 6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system or email
      3	3 Hours 6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system or email
      4	No SLA	Web-based ticketing system or email

      1. PLEASE NOTE: All tickets submitted by email will be classified as Severity 3 by default. Severity 4 issues are product feature requests and will be tracked in order to provide updates to customers but do not have a response SLA associated with them.
      2. The web interface at https://www.chef.io/support/tickets is the best method of submitting tickets to the Chef support team. From this interface, Customers may submit any severity level ticket, as well as view previously submitted tickets. To email a ticket, simply send an email to support@chef.io, and a new ticket will be generated.

3. CHEF CUSTOMER SUCCESS SUPPORT:If you are leveraging Chef for mission critical systems and need a level of proactive as well as reactive support, then the Chef Customer Success Subscription is the best support choice for you. Chef provides a team of dedicated professionals to ensure that you, the customer, are successful at learning and leveraging the considerable power of Chef throughout your journey. This proactive engagement model comes in addition to the premium support SLA described above. The Chef Customer Success Subscription is the highest and most delightful level of Chef support.

   1. Customer Engineering (CE) Team:As part of Chef Customer Success Support, the Customer Engineering (CE) Team will collaborate with a select number of your key automation champions to mentor your Chef implementation and advocate for your requirements within Chef. Chef will assign a Technical Account Manager (TAM) and a Customer Engineer (CE) to your account for the duration of your Chef subscription. The combination of the TAM and CE teams will provide you with a proactive engagement model designed to guide you through the various stages of your implementation. You will continue to have the ability to submit standard support tickets to our Support Team.
   2. Technical Account Manager (TAM):Your Technical Account Manager (TAM) is your main point of contact into the rest of Chef. Your TAM’s primarily responsibilities are:
      1. Mobilize Chef team members to maximize the success of your engagement with Chef
      2. Provide visibility into the status of your issues, bugs, support tickets, and feature requests
      3. Coordinate mentorship office hours (e.g. cookbook reviews) with your Customer Engineer
      4. Communicate your product feature requests to the Chef Engineering teams for evaluation
      5. Facilitate Chef product roadmap presentations with your organization
      6. Keep your team up to date on Chef product announcements
      7. Coordinate your participation in early access programs for new Chef products/features
      8. Facilitate the engagement between you and other Chef enterprise customers
   3. Customer Engineer (CE):Your Customer Engineer will technically mentor your Chef projects. Responsibilities include:
      1. Coordinate mutually agreed upon, regularly scheduled meetings to cover mentorship topics such as cookbook review and optimization, Chef Server operations and migrations, automation architecture review, cookbook reviews/optimization, and review of technical recommendations and practices
      2. Work on your Chef bugs/issues or escalate them to other Chef engineering teams if mutually beneficial to both parties
      3. Advocate your features or escalate them to other Chef engineering teams if mutually beneficial to both parties
      4. Hold Post-Mortems of Severity 1 issues to identify and address architectural issues
      5. Assist in the management, resolution and weekly review of outstanding support tickets
   4. Expanded Chef Software Product Support.With Chef Customer Success Support, Chef will extend your support beyond the Core Chef API Server and Chef Client support to include support for certain third party products as well. The following third party software will be included in the Service Level Agreement described in Section 1(a) above:
      1. Support for Chef Server Premium Add-ons: Chef will support all Premium Add-ons including
         1. Chef Manage
         2. Chef Reporting
         3. Chef Actions
         4. Chef Compliance
         5. Chef Federation
         6. Chef High Availability Architecture
         7. Chef Tiered Architecture
      2. Expanded Chef Client Support: Chef will also expand its support to include:
         1. Test Driven Infrastructure (Berkshelf, Foodcritic, Chefspec and Test Kitchen)
         2. Chef Solo
         3. Chef Zero
         4. Chef Provisioning

   5. Expanded Chef Cookbook Support:As part of Chef Customer Success Support, Chef will make available by appointment or through open hours a support service to provide code review and coaching focusing on the development of cookbooks for up to three individuals within the customer organization. Chef will provide a team of dedicated professionals to facilitate you, the customer, learning and leveraging the considerable power of Chef. Expanded Chef Cookbook Support does not include Chef resources writing cookbooks for the Customer. Expanded Cookbook Support is available to Chef Premium Subscription Customers on a drop in basis or through appointment as described below.

      Scheduling Available Hours Submission Method

      Drop In	6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system or email
      By Appointment	6 am – 6 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday	Web-based ticketing system or email

      1. By Appointment hours will be as agreed with the Chef Cookbook Review team out side of the scheduled hours.

4. CHEF ESSENTIALS SUPPORT:If you want to try our bare essentials before deciding to commit, Chef offers you support at the “Chef Standard” level for the first thirty days after you download our software. Thereafter, you’re on your own. Or, to continue being supported by Chef, you can then decide to continue with Chef Standard or upgrade to Chef Premium or Chef Customer Success.

5. HOSTING SERVICE FOR CHEF SUBSCRIPTION:Let us manage your Chef server for you. Take advantage of Hosted Chef, our powerful SaaS offering, and hand the work over to us. You can manage 5 nodes for free. If you have a Chef subscription, hosted Chef is available to you at no additional charge, and will include an availability SLA as described below:

   1. Availability:
      1. The Hosted Chef Service will be available to you 99.9% of the time in a given billing cycle. If we fail to meet this level, you will be eligible to receive a credit to your account. Credit will be granted according to Table 1. In order to receive any of the Service Credits referred to above, you must notify Chef in writing within thirty days from the date of the billing notification for the month in question. Failure to comply with this requirement will forfeit your right to receive a Service Credit.
      2. Chef considers the Hosting Service available when all the API calls required to successfully complete a Chef Client run are available, as reasonably determined by Chef. In the event of any customer support issue, if analysis determines that Chef is the cause of a customer’s issue it will be counted against our Service Level Objective of 99.9% monthly system availability. For avoidance of doubt, any “Incident” will not count against our Service Level Objective.
   2. Table 1: Service Credits:
      

      Monthly System Availability	Monthly Service Credit Provided
      < 99.1% – 99.9%	10%
      < 99.0% – 95.1%	15%
      < 95%	50%

6. DEFINITIONS/GENERAL:

   1. “Core Chef API Service”:means the API end points required for a chef-client run to complete. Some examples include
      1. /clients
      2. /clients/NAME
      3. /cookbooks/NAME/VERSION
      4. /data
      5. /data/NAME/ITEM
      6. /data/NAME
      7. /environments
      8. /environments/NAME
      9. /environments/NAME/cookbooks/NAME
      10. /environments/NAME/cookbook_versions
      11. /environments/NAME/cookbooks
      12. /environments/NAME/nodes
      13. /environments/NAME/recipes
      14. /environments/NAME/roles/NAME
      15. /nodes
      16. /nodes/NAME
      17. /roles
      18. /roles/NAME
      19. /roles/NAME/environments
      20. /roles/NAME/environments/NAME
      21. /sandboxes
      22. /sandboxes/ID
      23. /search
      24. /search/INDEX
      25. /user
   2. “Incident”means, generally, assistance from Chef for help beyond basic understanding of Chef products, services or features and functionality. An “Incident” is; (i) detailed analysis of customer written Chef code; (ii) debugging non-Chef libraries, gems, etc.; (iii) issues caused by Customer’s Unauthorized Use. For purposes of illustration only, the following are examples of services and support that would not constitute an Incident: (i) Software bugs; (ii) issues with data/fields; (iii) feature requests; (iv) basic Chef assistance seeking to understand Chef products, services or features and functionality.
   3. “Severity”:means the following for all levels of support:
      1. Severity 1:Core Chef API service functionality is unavailable or widespread client failure.
      2. Severity 2:Chef operations can continue in a restricted fashion, although long-term productivity might be adversely affected. Example: Core Chef API service functionality is available however other services are limited or inaccessible.
      3. Severity 3:Partial, non-critical loss of Chef functionality. Impaired operations of some components, but allows the user to continue using Chef. Example: Chef API service functionality is available but there is a minor degradation in service.
      4. Severity 4:General usage questions or product feature requests. Example: Errors in the documentation.

7. ESCALATION PROCEDURES:If for some reason you are not satisfied with your Support or do not think it meets the criteria above, you have the access to the following escalation procedure or may contact the following individuals directly at your discretion:

   	Name/Title	Email
   1	Director of Support	jeremyw@chef.io
   2	Customer Engineering Lead	irving@chef.io
   3	Customer Account Management Lead	mathilde@chef.io
   4	Vice President, Customer Success	tenochs@chef.io
   5	Chief Executive Officer (CEO)	barry@chef.io