Engine Yard is a Platform-as-a-Service company. We help you optimize technology to host and scale your presence on the web. We know that your web applications need to be up and running for your customers to be successful.
We understand how important your web presence is to the success of your business. That’s why we perform constant system monitoring and have a support staff that’s dedicated to helping you be successful with Engine Yard.
This support policy is in place to help you, our customer, understand the types of support we offer, the methods available for you to receive support, and the hours during which different support methods are available. We also want to help you understand what escalation procedures exist, should an issue prove difficult to solve.
Engine Yard uses enterprise-grade automated monitoring systems to track the operations of our infrastructure and platform across various dimensions to ensure maximum uptime and operability. These systems are all represented on dashboards in our Virtual Network Operations text-center (VNOC), which never sleeps. All alerts are sent to our VNOC Support Engineers, who take immediate action. Our Support Engineers are backed up by our entire team of Development Engineers when problems need to be escalated. This process is outlined later in this document.
Each issue is documented in our ticketing system. You, our customer, will have access to all of your historical tickets (and thus all documentation of issues). If an issue requires escalation to Engineering, it is tracked in our software development tracking system.
Upon resolution of a ticket, you have the option to answer a short two-question survey to indicate your level of satisfaction with any aspects of the issue. These responses are monitored continuously and are made public on our website. All unsatisfactory responses and their associated cases are reviewed weekly by a special cross-functional team.
This team includes a cross-section of representatives from our Support, Engineering and Management teams and conducts the weekly review sessions to improve the level of customer satisfaction we can provide. Additionally, this group identifies processes and operations that can be further improved to meet your expectations.
Engine Yard provides a single globally-distributed Support team staffed by engineers with various specialities and skills including system administration, database administration, programming, and developer operations. Incoming ticket requests are triaged to the appropriate specialists for resolution.
Engine Yard Customer Support may be contacted via any of the following means, in order of responsiveness:
As a point of escalation, each shift is led by a Team Lead or Support Manager. Issues may be further escalated to the Director of Technical Support, and onto the Senior Vice President of Operations and Engineering.
You may request immediate escalation for any issue which you feel is not being handled appropriately for your needs. The Support Management team regularly reviews all unsatisfactory tickets on a weekly basis during a weekly review meeting, as outlined earlier (see “Continuous Improvement” above).
Feature requests for our platform may be made within the appropriate forums in the Engine Yard Developer text-center. This is a good way to engage in an exchange of dialog with our Product Management team and, more importantly, the Engine Yard user community.
Our entire Product Management team regularly curates the forums and responds to feature requests. When requested features are added to the development work plan, a Product Manager will respond in the related forums thread to provide updates and set expectations.
As a feature requester, you will be invited to test the feature during its Early Access release, to ensure that it meets your needs and expectations, prior to its General Availability release to all our customers.
Issues may occasionally need to be escalated to our Development Engineering team. Issues with the performance of our platform are automatically directly escalated via an internal engineering ticket. That internal ticket is linked in our system with your support ticket, which documents the issue you are facing. During the resolution of the internal ticket, a Support Engineer will make regular status updates on your ticket.
Feature requests are handled via our Product Management team, as indicated above. Premium Support and Managed Services customers may request individual time with the Product Management team via your Customer Success Manager.
Available exclusively to our Premium Support and Managed Services customers only.
Customers who take advantage of our Premium Support or Managed Services will have an additional point of contact in the Customer Success team. The Customer Success team will keep you proactively informed on any and all issues which affect your web applications and uptime. For events which cause downtime, the Customer Success team may also provide you with root cause analyses to help you understand underlying issues and their mitigation strategies.
The Customer Success team may be contacted via the ticketing system or via phone escalation during Engine Yard’s regular business hours between 9am and 5pm in the US/Pacific time zone.
Engine Yard offers multiple Support tiers. Business hours vary per tier.
| Support Tier | Business Hours |
|---|---|
| Standard Support | 12x5 in the timezone of your choosing |
| Premium Support | 24x7 |
| Managed Services | 24x7 |
Our team treats all of the services Engine Yard provides as mission-critical. Support tiers are prioritized from highest to lowest as follows:
We have additionally identified several priorities, depending on how critical they are to your uptime. We rely on this framework to help set your expectations. You may request escalation for any issue that you feel we may have mis-prioritized.
These issues affect the most foundational aspects of the Engine Yard service provided to you.
Urgent Priority indicates an issue that affects your production environments where all your users, your data integrity may be at stake, and most or all of your production web application system is unavailable.During a mass outage event, this response time will apply exclusively to Premium Support customers and Managed Services customers. Our response time to Standard Support customers will be contingent upon the nature and priority of the outage. Wider spread outages will likely result in longer response times.
These issues affect major functionality of your application. In High Priority issues, data integrity of the functional parts of your site is unaffected.
Normal Priority issues can include technical questions, configuration issues, and defects that affect a small number of users. Typically acceptable workarounds exist.
Non-severe issues include questions, suggestions and feedback.
Engine Yard Support operates in 3 global regions: The Americas; Europe, Africa and the Middle East; and Asia/Pacific. We are committed to rapidly responding to support issues. All issues are tracked on our ticketing system in the Developer text-center.
Engine Yard Support responds to Urgent issues 24 hours a day. Lower priority issues will be addressed during business hours, as indicated above under “Business Hours.”
While we offer no guarantees that we will meet or exceed the response times indicated below, Engine Yard Support makes commercially reasonable efforts to do so.
| Priority | Response Time |
|---|---|
| Urgent | 30 minutes |
| High | 4 business hours |
| Normal | 1 business day |
| Low | 3 business days |
Every single issue for which we are contacted is logged as a ticket.
We have identified three levels of outage, depending on its severity and how widespread it is. We follow a specific process for each outage type, as indicated:
In all cases, we report the issue in the Known Issues section of the Developer text-center. We continually update that Known Issue report until the issue has been resolved.
During an outage our target response times, as listed above under “Response Times,” may be compromised: we do our best to meet them.
Engine Yard’s product team maintains the official software stack for the Engine Yard platform. Most of the stack component software is maintained in the open source community. As such, we rely on the community to keep the software up to date as far as features and security
