Chef Support Service Level Agreements

October 23, 2019 (view archived version)

Chef will provide support for Supported Applications as provided below.

1. SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT:
   1. Chef Standard Support. Chef will support the Supported Applications in accordance with the following table:
      

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

   2. Chef Premium Support. Chef will support the Supported Applications in accordance with the following table. Additionally, if Chef believes an on-site visit is best to support a Severity 1 issue, Chef may offer to send someone onsite to provide support in person. For any such on-site support, Chef will work with Customer to complete any pre-qualifications necessary for our Chef resources to be able to come onsite expediently. Severity 1 follow up may include phone, video conferencing, and on-site support as needed.
      

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

2. SUBMISSION NOTES/REQUIREMENTS:
   1. The web interface at https://www.chef.io/support is the method for submitting tickets to the Chef support team. From this interface, Customers may submit any severity level ticket, as well as view previously submitted tickets.
   2. Customer must have hardware sufficient to meet the minimum requirements of the Supported Applications. Customer operating systems must not be EOL (End of Life) or in extended lifecycle phase.
   3. Service requesters must have knowledge about the technical details associated with the service request, knowledge of the applicable operating system and configuration of the environment.
   4. All tickets submitted by email will be classified as Severity 3 by default.
3. CONTENT & COMMUNICATIONS

   a. Chef customers will have access to additional content and communications channels according to the Chef Support tier to which they have subscribed, per the table below.

   	Chef Standard Support	Chef Premium Support
   Office Hours	Access to Office Hours content, including tech demos, expert advice, & more.	Ability to request Office Hours content specific to your needs and schedule.
   Direct Communications	Access to Chef via Success Slack channels for Standard & Premium Support customers only.	Access to Chef via a private, dedicated Slack channel for the customer organization.
   Advisor Access	For Customers licensing at least $100,000 in Software per year, Chef will also provide access to the Chef Customer Success team for expert guidance and regular communications and updates on tools, patterns, and practices with Chef.

4. DEFINITIONS:
   1. “Deprecated” means Supported Applications that are supported by Chef but for which a newer version or alternative Supported Applications are available and recommended for Chef customer use. Chef no longer provides scheduled releases for Deprecated Software but may produce ad hoc Updates in response to customer issues and/or security vulnerabilities at the sole discretion of Chef. Deprecated Software is targeted for End of Life but a timeline has not yet been announced for End of Life.
   2. “End of Life” means Supported Applications that, as of a date set and announced by Chef at https://docs.chef.io/platforms/, will no longer be supported by Chef. At conclusion of the End of Life notification period, the Supported Applications will no longer be available for download by Chef customers.
   3. “Generally Available” means Supported Applications that are released and supported for use by Chef customers as provided in this Support Service Level Agreement.
   4. “Release” means incremental revisions to the Supported Applications and made available in the “current” and/or “stable” channel published to https://www.chef.io/downloads. Current releases are produced more frequently, and are not recommended for use in production environments. Releases available in the stable channel have corresponding release notes and are recommended for production use.
   5. “Severity”: means the following:
      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.
         1. Severe degradation of server product services (e.g. one server in an HA cluster down, bulk of client runs failing, etc.).
         2. Workflow tools failing (e.g. inability to push any cookbook changes over multiple cookbooks, etc.).
         3. 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 Supported Applications. 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.
         1. Chef API service functionality is available but there is a minor degradation in service.
         2. 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. Product feature requests will be tracked in order to provide updates to customers, but do not have a response SLA associated with them.
         1. Errors in the documentation.
         2. Assistance for server, client, or workflow tool or other feature installation.
         3. Assistance with non-Chef-produced cookbooks and Chef-related software.
         4. Feature requests.
   6. “Supported Applications” means the platforms and supported versions listed at https://docs.chef.io/platforms//. This page also reflects the lifecycle status of each Supported Application as Generally Available, Deprecated, or End of Life.
   7. “Update” means updates, enhancements, bug fixes, patches, and other error corrections that Chef makes generally available free of charge to all customers then entitled to Support Services described herein. Chef may or may not continue to develop new Updates for Supported Applications. Please see https://docs.chef.io/platforms/ for more details.
   8. “Version” means a Major Version in the following format: Major Version.Minor Version.Patch Level
5. EXCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS:
   1. Changes/Derivatives. Chef reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to limit or refuse to support and maintain derivatives made by a customer; such derivatives may impact Chef’s ability to perform support.
   2. Limitations. Chef will support each Major Version of Supported Applications for a minimum of twenty-four (24) months from date it is Generally Available. Chef will not be responsible for: (a) correcting any errors not reproducible by Chef or errors not caused by Chef or Supported Applications: (b) customer’s failure to implement all Updates and Upgrades provided by Chef; (c) changes to the operating system or environment which adversely affect Supported Applications; or (d) accident, negligence, or misuse of Supported Applications.
   3. Updates. Chef may develop and provide Updates in its sole discretion. Chef has no obligation to develop any Updates at all or for particular issues. Further Chef may provide some or all Updates via download from a website designated by Chef. Chef has no obligation to provide Updates via any other media. Support services do not include any new Version or new Release of the Software that Chef may issue as a separate or new product, and Chef may determine whether any issuance qualifies as a new Version, new Release, or Update in its sole discretion. In some cases, customer will be required to upgrade to the latest Release of Chef Software to receive the fix for an issue or defect.
      
   4. End of Life: Chef reserves its right to, in its sole discretion, to designate Supported Applications, in whole or in part, as End of Life. As a condition of moving the lifecycle status to End of Life, Chef will make available or continue to provide an alternate application with comparable functionality; or, if Chef decides to discontinue Supported Applications entirely, Chef will provide at least six (6) months’ prior written notice to Customer to allow Customer to upgrade or migrate to other available solutions.
6. ESCALATION PROCEDURES: At Chef we pride ourselves on delivering world-class support to our customers. When a ticket is submitted to our support staff, our highly skilled and trained Chef experts will work to resolve the 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.

HOSTED CHEF SUPPORT SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT

Chef will provide support for Supported Applications as provided below.

1. SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT:
   1. Hosted Chef Support. Chef will support Hosted Chef in accordance with the following table for Chef Standard Support:
      

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

   2. Service Availability.
      1. Chef makes the Hosted Chef service available 99.9% of the time in a given billing cycle (“Service Level Objective”). If Chef fails to meet this level, affected Customers will be eligible to receive a credit to their account. Credit will be granted according to Section 1(c) below. In order to receive any of the Service Credits referred to above, Customer must notify Chef in writing within thirty days of the date of Chef’s failure to meet this service level. Failure to comply with this requirement will forfeit Customer’s right to receive a Service Credit.
      2. Chef considers Hosted Chef available when the command/run of chef-client is 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 the Service Level Objective of 99.9% monthly system.
   3. Hosted Chef Service Availability Service Credits.
      

      Monthly System Availability	Monthly Service Credit Provided
      99.1% – 99.9% 95.0% – 99.0% < 95.0%	10% 15% 50%

2. SUBMISSION NOTES/REQUIREMENTS::
   1. The web interface at https://www.chef.io/support is the method for submitting tickets to the Chef support team. From this interface, Customers may submit any severity level ticket, as well as view previously submitted tickets.
   2. Customer must have hardware sufficient to meet the minimum requirements of Supported Applications. Customer operating systems must not be EOL (End of Life) or in extended lifecycle phase.
   3. Service requesters must have knowledge about the technical details associated with the service request, knowledge of the applicable operating system and configuration of the environment.
   4. All tickets submitted by email will be classified as Severity 3 by default.
3. DEFINITIONS:
   1. “Severity”: means the following:
      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.
         1. Severe degradation of server product services (e.g. one server in an HA cluster down, bulk of client runs failing, etc.).
         2. Workflow tools failing (e.g. inability to push any cookbook changes over multiple cookbooks, etc.)
         3. 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 Supported Applications. 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.
         1. Chef API service functionality is available but there is a minor degradation in service.
         2. 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. Product feature requests will be tracked in order to provide updates to customers, but do not have a response SLA associated with them.
         1. Errors in the documentation.
         2. Assistance for server, client, or workflow tool or other feature installation.
         3. Assistance with non-Chef-produced cookbooks and Chef-related software.
         4. Feature requests.
   2. “Supported Applications” means the Software products identified in the applicable Order Form.
   3. “Update” means updates, enhancements, bug fixes, patches, and other error corrections that Chef makes generally available free of charge to all customers then entitled to Support Services described herein. Chef may or may not continue to develop new Updates for Supported Applications.
   4. “Version” means a Major Version in the following format: Major Version.Minor Version.Patch Level
      
4. EXCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS::
   1. Changes/Derivatives. Chef reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to limit or refuse to support and maintain derivatives made by a customer; such derivatives may impact Chef’s ability to perform support.
   2. Limitations. Chef will support each Major Version of Supported Applications for a minimum of twenty-four (24) months from date it is Generally Available. Chef will not be responsible for: (a) correcting any errors not reproducible by Chef or errors not caused by Chef or Supported Applications: (b) customer’s failure to implement all Updates and Upgrades provided by Chef; (c) changes to the operating system or environment which adversely affect Supported Applications; or (d) accident, negligence, or misuse of Supported Applications.
   3. Updates. Chef may develop and provide Updates in its sole discretion. Chef has no obligation to develop any Updates at all or for particular issues. Further Chef may provide some or all Updates via download from a website designated by Chef. Chef has no obligation to provide Updates via any other media. Support services do not include any new Version or new Release of the Software that Chef may issue as a separate or new product, and Chef may determine whether any issuance qualifies as a new Version, new Release, or Update in its sole discretion. In some cases, customer will be required to upgrade to the latest Release of Chef Software to receive the fix for an issue or defect.
   4. End of Life: Chef reserves its right to, in its sole discretion, to designate Supported Applications, in whole or in part, as End of Life. As a condition of moving the lifecycle status to End of Life, Chef will make available or continue to provide an alternate application with comparable functionality; or, if Chef decides to discontinue Supported Applications entirely, Chef will provide at least six (6) months’ prior written notice to Customer to allow Customer to upgrade or migrate to other available solutions.

5. ESCALATION PROCEDURES: At Chef we pride ourselves on delivering world-class support to our customers. When a ticket is submitted to our support staff, our highly skilled and trained Chef experts will work to resolve the 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.