Service Level Agreements

Service Definitions

Different severity levels describe how urgent a support request is:

• Level 1 (Emergency): A production problem which may severely impact the client’s production systems, or in which client’s production systems are down or not functioning; loss of production data or up time, and no procedural work around exists.
• Level 2 (Urgent): A problem where the client’s system is functioning but in a severely reduced capacity. The situation is causing significant impact to portions of the client’s business operations and productivity. The system is exposed to potential loss or interruption of service.
• Level 3 (Normal): A medium-to-low impact problem which involves partial non-critical functionality loss. One which impairs some operations but allows the client to continue to function. This may be a minor issue with limited loss or no loss of functionality or impact to the client’s operation and issues in which there is an easy circumvention or avoidance by the end user.
• Level 4 : These are issues which do not impact the functioning of usage, but do serve to create small annoyances. This includes documentation errors.

The client acknowledges that not all Level 3 or Level 4 problems will require a workaround. CloudAfrica may, in its reasonable discretion, respond to a Level 3 or Level 4 problem by making the error a feature request. CloudAfrica will keep a full list of feature requests in a client road map, and prioritise development according to the client’s requirements.
Feature development is outside the scope of this agreement.

Support Logging

Customers may log all faults via e-mail, twitter or telephone in the case of emergencies. A support ticket will be generated from an e-mail, twitter, or a support person logging a fault. First line support will be responsible for monitoring all tickets logged, and assigning an appropriate status and resource to them.

In the event of an emergency, the support person is expected to log a ticket immediately upon receiving an emergency call. They will then follow the emergency procedure, to the point that either the issue is resolved, or the issue needs to be escalated by the support team. Front-line support may not escalate the issue until each step in the support procedure guide has been checked.

If the issue needs to be escalated the second line support person is expected to act on incident immediately, and the front-line support person is expected to contact the customer to communicate that the issue has been escalated.

Throughout the process of resolving a ticket, the customer must be updated at the following milestones:

• Ticket opened
• Ticket is being diagnosed
• Actively fixing problem
• Problem solved
• Testing and verification
• Client to close

If a ticket is not closed within a week of the ticket state changing to “Testing/verified”, the ticket will be closed by CloudAfrica.