Support Terms
Last updated: March 2nd, 2023
Contents
Crate.io reserves the right to change, alter, replace, or otherwise modify these Support Terms at any time, the date of last modification is stated at the top of these Support Terms.
- Basic support is available for CrateDB (on-premises) as a paid annual subscription and included with all CrateDB Cloud products
- Premium support is available for all CrateDB products (on-premises and Cloud) as a paid annual subscription
- Development support is available for CrateDB (on-premises) as a paid annual subscription for non-production use cases in development
Contacting Crate.io Support
Crate.io support is available for all CrateDB Cloud users and on-premises users with an active support contract.
Customers receive support for Crate.io products by opening a support ticket in a private support portal provided during onboarding (https://support.crate.io) or by sending an email to support@crate.io.
Sending an email will automatically open a ticket in the support portal (S3-Severity).
Types of Support Tickets
Support tickets come in one of the types below. Each of the types influences how Crate.io Support deals with customer tickets:
Operational support is handled by Crate.io with the response times of an incident with high severity (i.e., levels S1 and S2 as defined in the Response Time table below). Tickets are considered operational support, if:
- Customers are experiencing deterioration in the value they are receiving from a Crate.io product (such as unexpected behavior or an interruption of service) on their productive environments (S1)
- Customers experience a complete loss of service, and the customer's business is severely impacted (S1)
- While operations can continue in a restricted fashion, key features are unavailable with no acceptable workaround, and the business of the customer is severely impacted (S2)
- Any S1 issues with a workaround available (S2)
Consultative support is handled by Crate.io with the response times of an incident with low severity. Tickets are considered service requests, if:
- activation or reconfiguration of a Crate.io product or service is needed to better suit customer needs (S3)
- Bugs are reported (S3)
- Customers have questions on the expected behavior of the Crate.io products (S4)
- features are requested (S4)
Response time
Depending on the support needed and the support plan, customers can expect the following response time from Crate.io Support for issues raised via the support portal or email (support@crate.io):| Support Type |
Severity |
Basic Support |
Premium Support | Development Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operational Support |
S1 - Blocker |
4 Business Hours |
1 Hour |
n/a |
|
S2 - Incident |
8 Business Hours |
4 Business Hours |
n/a |
|
| Consultative Support |
S3 - Impediment |
2 Business Days |
2 Business Days |
2 Business Days |
|
S4 - Question |
5 Business Days |
5 Business Days |
5 Business Days |
Response time represents the time until the Crate.io support team will start working on the support request submitted by the customer.
- Crate.io Business Days are Monday through Friday, excluding National Holidays in Austria and Germany.
- Crate.io Business Hours are 8 AM to 5 PM CET/CEST (Central European Time) unless otherwise stated in the contract.
Additional business hours can be agreed upon on an individual basis. Please contact us (https://crate.io/contact).
Working time
After the first response, Crate.io Support will work on each ticket towards resolution according to its current severity. Depending on their support plan, customers can expect:
| Support Type |
Severity |
Basic Support |
Premium Support | Development Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operational Support |
S1 - Blocker |
Continuous work during Crate.io business hours |
Initial work/fix 24x7 |
n/a |
|
S2 - Incident |
Daily status updates by end of business (**) |
Daily status updates by end of business (**) |
n/a |
|
| Consultative Support |
S3 - Impediment |
Status update every 2 weeks (**) |
Status update every 2 weeks (**) |
Status update every 2 weeks (**) |
|
S4 - Question |
Status update every 4 weeks (**) |
Status update every 4 weeks (**) |
Status update every 4 weeks (**) |
(*) Or as agreed between Crate.io and the customer on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
(**) Or as relevant progress occurs.
Working time represents the time during which Crate.io support team will work on the support request submitted by the customer. There is no guaranteed duration to solve the support request as the complexity and root causes of issues can vary.
Support cases will be handled in written form on the issue raised via the support portal. If suitable, Crate.io support engineers will ask customers for a video call to solve the problem together or clarify open questions. After such a call, the support issue will be updated to have the latest information documented.
Language
The primary language for support requests is English.
Support in other languages is provided on a best-effort basis and subject to staff availability.
Scope of Crate.io Support
Crate.io Support covers development and production issues for CrateDB Cloud (DBaaS), CrateDB Edge and CrateDB on-premises deployments, covering situations such as (examples only):
- Troubleshooting issues with the Crate.io products (CrateDB, CrateDB Cloud, CrateDB Edge),
- Troubleshooting well-defined situations where the documented, public APIs do not behave as documented,
- Issues with our consoles (such as the CrateDB Admin UI or the Cloud Console) and the use-cases supported by them (e.g., deployments, scaling/up down, managing security, performance monitoring),
- Troubleshooting operational or system-related problems with CrateDB Cloud (DBaaS),
- Problems detected automated by the monitoring of Crate.io,
- Providing advice on database schema setup, best practices for integration with our official database clients and generic questions on the products.
- Hands on installation of CrateDB Edge on the customers infrastructure,
- Developing applications for the customer or answering questions on the customers application architecture,
- Debugging applications,
- Analyzing and troubleshooting the performance of applications or infrastructure
- Analyzing and troubleshooting customizations made to supported components obtained from Crate.io as samples which were modified by the customer,
- Analyzing and troubleshooting non-supported community-maintained components and tools obtained from Crate.io,
- Performing system administration tasks (including network tasks and troubleshooting networking issues) on on-premises installations.
Additionally, Crate.io shall have no obligation to support:
- Any other software installed in companion with CrateDB on the same or neighboring systems, as well as software interfaces that are not supported by Crate.io;
- Problems caused by Customer’s negligence, abuse or misapplication or use of the Software other than as specified in the Documentation, in the Licensing Information or other causes beyond the control of Crate.io.
Additionally, Crate.io reserves the right to change the used product configuration for CrateDB Cloud Clusters if needed. In that case, the customer will be informed before the new product configuration will be of the similar or better performance, for the underlying use case. This will only be done, if the old cluster configuration is no longer supported.
The expected behavior and correct usage of Crate.io products are documented in our public documentation.
Help Us Help You
The customer is expected to manage “First Line Support” services for all systems, services and applications provided to their own users (L1). This customer-handled support shall be able to provide direct responses to all requests raised by users regarding the software, including issues relating to performance, functionality, configuration, and operation.
If, after reasonable commercial efforts, the customers own support is unable to diagnose or resolve problems or issues in the software or Cloud/SaaS service, Crate.io may be contacted for “Second Line Support” (L2). The customer must use all commercially reasonable efforts to provide Crate.io with the necessary access and resources required (e.g., access to servers, copies of on-disk data stores, log files, insights into how the customer utilizes Crate.io products or services etc.) to verify that observed issues originate in the software or service provided and for Crate.io being able to provide Second Level Support. Crate.io Support may escalate issues further to our product development teams (L3) for assistance if required and deemed necessary.
If access to the customer's systems cannot be provided, or issues cannot be replicated due to limited information provided, Crate.io will be unable to guarantee the quality of support and cannot be held accountable for delays in resolution.
To speed up the troubleshooting of problems, the customer needs to ensure to include the below information when reporting an issue:
- Customer Name: the owner of Crate.io product with the problem,
- The version of the Crate.io product the customer is using (if on-premises) or the URL to the database service / SaaS service the customer is referring to,
- The problem the customer is experiencing, and steps to reproduce the problem,
- Assessment of the severity level of the problem and why.
The customer needs to ensure to accurately explain the problem that is experienced so that Crate.io support engineers can help solve the problem quickly. Also, the customer must ensure availability in case Crate.io support engineers need further direct assistance for troubleshooting during working times (according to Severity and Setup, see “Working time”).
Software Updates
Crate.io provides three types of software updates:- Patches are maintenance updates that include defect fixes and, occasionally, minor new features.
- Minor versions are evolutionary updates that introduce significant improvements and changes. They may include breaking changes, affecting existing applications depending on Crate.io products.
- Major versions are used to deliver significant changes to the products of Crate.io. They may include breaking changes, affecting existing applications depending on Crate.io products.
CrateDB Cloud / Edge customers will receive information on new software and are able to schedule minor/major software updates of their environments with Crate.io Support (see “CrateDB Cloud Scheduled Maintenance”).
Additionally, CrateDB Edge customers will have to take care of upgrading the components of their Edge installation themselves. Customers of CrateDB Edge are responsible for updating their Kubernetes Infrastructure to meet the requirements documented by Crate.io.
When a version of the Crate.io software reaches the end of mainstream support, Crate.io will inform the affected customers and organize the mandatory upgrades of the CrateDB Cloud / Edge environments to a supported version.
Customers with on-premises environments are responsible for updating those environments and their applications. Customers can find the latest Software Updates via the common package managers or at https://crate.io/download. Customers may also request an application upgrade service from Crate.io or from one of our partners (fees are not included with the Support subscription).
Customers should always plan their updates carefully to have a minimal business impact. When a Software Update impacts existing applications, Crate.io will provide a technical note with update strategies as part of release notes. See https://crate.io/docs/crate/reference/en/latest/appendices/release-notes/
CrateDB Cloud Scheduled Maintenance
From time to time, Crate.io will perform maintenance on the CrateDB Cloud / SaaS services of our customers. These maintenance tasks update the software to ensure you benefit from new capabilities and defect fixes. In the event of Scheduled Maintenance:
- Crate.io will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify Customers with at least 2 business days in advance.
- Crate.io will notify all technical contacts associated with the company via email or service info ticket.
- If the maintenance task has an impact on customers use of Crate.io’s services (e.g., downtime of the core database offering or related service required for the customer to fulfill their services), upon request Crate.io will reschedule the maintenance task. **
(**) For example, the deployment of a CrateDB Hotfix in the CrateDB Cloud/SaaS service is usually performed as a rolling update to the database services, not requiring a downtime. A minor/major release upgrade of the database service may impact the customers’ application, requiring testing of the full software stack – hence this is a task that Crate.io offers to reschedule.
End of support for older software versions
Crate.io provides regular support and updates for each software version:- For a minimum of 1 year from the original release date;
- As long as a valid subscription exists, and
- Until Crate.io discontinues such software version.
When a particular software Version is discontinued, Crate.io is no longer able to release updates to such version. Customers with a valid subscription are still entitled to open support tickets for a software version that reached the end of mainstream support, but:
- Crate.io cannot guarantee a response within the defined SLA,
- Ticket resolutions will only include advice or workarounds (when available),
- When a fix is needed to resolve a ticket, Crate.io will only provide such a fix in an update for a currently supported version. In this situation, the customer will have to upgrade their platform to a version under mainstream support,
- The availability SLA for the Crate.io Cloud / Edge is not guaranteed.