Chef Support Service Level Agreements

May 6, 2016(view archived version)

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

1. CHEF STANDARD 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. The following table is our Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Chef Standard Support:

   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.
   4. Minimum Requirements: Hardware sufficient to meet the minimum requirements of software installed per version of Chef Software. Operating Systems must not be EOL (End of Life) or in extended Life-cycle phase.
   5. Service requesters must have knowledge about the technical details associated with the service request, knowledge of the Operating System and configuration of the environment

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

   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.
   4. Minimum Requirements: Hardware sufficient to meet the minimum requirements of software installed per version of Chef Software. Operating Systems must not be EOL (End of Life) or in extended Life-cycle phase.
   5. Service requesters must have knowledge about the technical details associated with the service request. Knowledge of the Operating System and configuration of the environment.

3. CHEF ESSENTIALS SUPPORT: If you want to try our bare essentials before deciding to commit, Chef offers you support for the below products at the “Chef Subscription” level for the first thirty days after you download our software:

   1. Supported Server Products ul li Chef Server Core
   2. Supported Client/Workflow Products ul li Knife li Chef Client li Chef-built Knife Plugins li Chef-built Cookbooks

   After the introductory period ends, you can upgrade to Chef Standard or Chef Premium Support to continue leveraging Chef support.

4. DEFINITIONS/GENERAL:

   1. “Severity:” means the following for all levels of support:
      1. Severity 1: Whole System outage of a production server product. Complete inability to service client requests
      2. Severity 2: Chef operations can continue in a restricted fashion, although long-term productivity might be adversely affected.
         • Severe degradation of server product services (e.g. one server in an HA cluster down, bulk of client runs failing, etc.).
         • Workflow tools failing (e.g. inability to push any cookbook changes over multiple cookbooks, etc.)
         • 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.
         • Chef API service functionality is available but there is a minor degradation in service.
         • Any other Chef server product, client, or workflow tool malfunction (e.g. one Chef client out of several failing repeatedly)
      4. Severity 4: General usage questions or product feature requests.
         • Errors in the documentation.
         • Assistance for server, client, or workflow tool installation.
         • Assistance with non Chef-produced cookbooks and Chef-related software.
         • Feature requests.

      * You acknowledge that not all Severity 3 problems will require a workaround. Chef may, in its reasonable discretion, respond to a Severity 3 problem by making the Error a feature request and downgrade the severity.

   2. Business Day means, any day which is not a Saturday, a Sunday or a United States public holiday

5. ESCALATION PROCEDURES: At Chef we pride ourselves on delivering world-class support to our customers. Your success is our success. When a ticket is submitted to our support staff, you will work with a highly skilled and trained Chef expert to resolve your issue as quickly as possible.If for some reason you are not satisfied with your support experience or do not think we are meeting the SLA criteria above, please escalate your concern to supportmanagement@chef.io.