Support Policy

Overview

Support tickets are categorised according to a severity or business impact scale. Sonra support efforts are prioritised based on the business impact of the issue, and on the support level of the Customer organisation, the technology area and/or operating level agreement with third party vendors.

Please use the email address [email protected] to raise a support ticket.

When submitting a support ticket, you are requested to supply detailed information (severity, such as name and version of the product, platforms, example machines, steps to reproduce, exact error messages, logs, changes made to the system or environment prior to the issue, etc.) for the Sonra support staff to properly identify and diagnose the issue and speed up response and resolution of the ticket. Failure to supply this information upon request may result in delay of support assistance.

Sonra technical support cannot guarantee a fixed problem resolution period due to a number of influencing factors, amongst them:

Customer’s timely replies
Response time of a third party company
The need to prepare and release hotfix, software update, new feature, etc.

The Business Impact / Severity of a support ticket is set according to the guidelines listed below. Since it is not possible to define every possible condition or technical situation, these guidelines can only provide guidance.

Critical/System Down (Severity One)

Production application down or major malfunction resulting in a product inoperative condition. Users unable to reasonably perform their normal functions.

The specific functionality is mission critical to the business and the situation is considered an emergency.

Qualifying Conditions (examples for illustration purposes)

Sonra Flexter becomes unusable in production environment (Example: Sonra Flexter doesn’t run or stops with error - the problem occurs on each attempt regardless of input data set)
Sonra Flexter stops processing mission critical data point(s) (e.g. the root table is not being created/populated preventing from joining output data set).
Sonra Flexter related issue that stops all other system’s functions resulting in a loss of business productivity and remote monitoring functionality (e.g. Target database becomes unresponsive).

Support Effort

Requires maximum effort from Sonra and Customer, until an emergency fix is developed or workaround is available.

Critical situations may require both Customer and Sonra personnel to be at their respective work locations on an around-the-clock basis.

If the authorised or designated Customer contact is not available to engage in this effort, Sonra Support may reduce the Severity level. If the Customer refuses to implement the steps suggested to troubleshoot or correct the issue, Sonra Support may close the ticket.

Significant Impact (Severity Two)

Critical loss of application functionality or performance resulting in a high number of users unable to perform their normal functions. Major feature/product failure; inconvenient workaround or no workaround exists. The program is usable but severely limited.

Qualifying Conditions (examples for illustration purposes)

Significant number of data values for the mission critical target data point are not populated or misrepresented (ie. truncated) making it impossible to derive any business value (e.g. The field ‘company name’ is getting truncated for 10% of incoming data values. 15% of values for ‘company name’ field are coded using language-specific characters which are not translated properly)
Time sensitive issue reported by Customer, which may adversely affect their productivity (Examples: Flexter processing becomes much slower than usual for the same data volumes, going beyond processing window/SLA).

Support Effort

Requires intensive support effort from Sonra and Customer, until a fix is developed or workaround is available.

Severity 2 situations do not generally require Customer and Sonra personnel to be at their respective work locations on an around-the-clock basis. Sonra Support personnel will agree with Customer what effort is required.

Normal impact (Severity Three)

Moderate loss of application functionality or performance resulting in multiple users impacted in their normal functions. Minor feature/product failure, convenient workaround exists/minor performance degradation/not impacting production.

Qualifying Conditions (examples for illustration purposes)

The software still functions in the Customer’s business environment, but there are functional limitations that are not critical in the daily operation (Example: The data points are being processed but there is an unexpected formatting applied to it)
Does not prevent operation of a production system or there is some degradation in performance (Example: Flexter can’t process unexpectedly large data volume but splitting it into multiple parts helps)

Support Effort

Requires moderate support effort from Sonra and Customer, until a fix is developed or workaround is available.

Normal Impact (Severity 3) situations do not require around-the-clock effort.

If the Customer refuses to implement the steps suggested to troubleshoot or correct the issue, Sonra Support may close the ticket.

Low/Informational (Severity Four)

Minor loss of application functionality, product feature requests, how-to questions. The issue consists of “how-to” questions including issues related to one or multiple modules and integration, installation and configuration inquiries, enhancement requests, or documentation questions.

Qualifying Conditions

Problem does not have significant impact to the Customer or occurs in functionality that is not critical or frequently used (Example: Target data point that is not being used by Customer is not populated correctly).
The problem causes little impact on your operations or a reasonable workaround for the problem has been implemented (Example: Timestamp carrying time zone information is stored as varchar output rather than native dedicated data type supported by the database).
The problem results in minimal or no interruptions to normal operations.
There are no extenuating circumstances that would require this issue to be resolved outside of the normal software (Example: Customer has general questions about functionality of a particular item. Customer does not understand X in documentation and would like clarification).
Non-critical, Minor loss of application functionality or product Feature Request question.
Minor infractions including documentation or cosmetic error not impacting production.

Support Effort

Requires low support effort from Sonra and Customer, until a fix is developed, a workaround is available or an answer to the Customer question has been provided.

Low Impact (Severity 4) situations do not require around-the-clock effort.