Support Options Feature Comparison

Cloud deployments

Server and Data Center deployments

¹ Entitlement for Community support - Community Support (from the Crossbill Community) is available to anyone who signs up. Users of cloud Free plans are only eligible for community support.

² Initial response times – Crossbill will use commercially reasonable efforts to meet the target initial response time for the applicable severity level:

• Level 1: Production application down or major malfunction affecting business and high number of staff

• Level 2: Serious degradation of application performance or functionality

• Level 3: Application issue that has a moderate impact to the business

• Level 4: Issue or question with limited business impact

³ Technical Support hours - Weekend coverage applies to Enterprise, Premium, Priority, and Premier Support programs. Weekend support does not cover free or open source products like Crossbill Packager and Crossbill Central. Weekend support does not include issues unrelated to technical support (i.e: Billing and Licensing.) Weekends start from Friday 5PM until Monday 10AM Australian Eastern timezone (UTC+10 & UTC+11 DST). During weekends when a Premier or Enterprise Support team member is not scheduled in advance, Premier Support requests are handled by the Select and Standard Support team. Premier Support engineers must be requested at least 3 weeks in advance and must be confirmed by Crossbill as available per request.

⁴ 9/5 Support - Hours of coverage include 8AM - 5PM Monday - Friday for the following timezones: Australia Western Standard Time (UTC+8), Australia Central Standard Time (UTC+9), Australia Eastern Standard Time (UTC+10). Tickets will be handled in the office corresponding to the geo in which they are submitted. If and when timezone-based global coverage becomes available, the hours listed here will apply. 

⁵ Premier Support Named Contacts - As part of your Premier purchase, we connect our top-tier engineers with the most knowledgeable individuals at your company. When you make your purchase, you give us the names of individuals most likely to contact our team. We limit the number of named contacts to three (per $39,500 per account). If you need additional named contacts, you can purchase three at a time with additional Premier licenses. Account coverage pertains to all active Crossbill server product licenses and does not include Open Source products or 3rd party apps.

Premier Support Key Benefits & Details

• Server/Data Center account-wide coverage: Premier support is an account wide service that covers all of your installed Server and Data Center Crossbill products and Crossbill Supported Apps.
• Direct access and phone support from a dedicated senior support team  - All Premier Support tickets are handled and responded to by advanced senior support engineers with advanced technical and soft skills to better aid customers with complex environments and mission critical needs. Phone support and daily/weekly conference calls are highly leveraged during critical issue resolution.
• Development team priority  - Higher priority queue placement is given to Premier Support customers when issues have to be escalated through to our development organization for assistance or fixes.
• 24 x 7 phone support - Local regional phone numbers are given out to all Premier Support customers and phones are covered 24x7 to guarantee that you can connect with an engineer directly to assist you and to more quickly understand your issue without requiring you to wait for multiple ticket bounces.
• Screen-sharing, collaboration phone calls, and health checks  - Our team is highly accustomed to screen-sharing sessions with customers to reduce miscommunications and delays, which lowers resolution times.
• Weekend coverage  - Premier Support customers receive weekend support for their products, select server and data center support customers do not receive weekend coverage. Please click the link below for additional details as some products are excluded from coverage and/or restricted by severity.
• Account on-boarding - Our team records your hardware, software, network, and configuration details during a series of on-boarding calls and discussions to ensure we have your detailed environment information available before your first ticket is filed, further reducing overall resolution times, questions, and delays for each follow-on issue.
• Health Checks - During on-boarding our team performs health checks and performs best practice analysis across each of the Crossbill systems. Customers can also request that additional health checks be performed during upgrades on both staging and production environments, which assists with more trouble free upgrade experiences.
• Other additional Premier Support offerings  - Find out what other offering and benefits come from Premier Support by clicking on the following link: Premier Support Offering Details.

Priority Support Key Benefits & Details

• Mission critical coverage - Priority Support can be purchased for your most critical Crossbill instances - ensuring you have elevated support when you need

• Advanced team for critical issues  - All critical Priority Support tickets (L1/L2) will route directly to our most senior Support Engineers (24x5).

• 24 x 7 phone support and weekend support for L1 issues - Local regional phone numbers are given out to all Priority Support customers and phones are covered 24x7 to guarantee that you can connect with an engineer directly to assist you with your Level 1 severity issues.

• Screen-sharing and collaboration phone calls  - Our team is highly accustomed to screen-sharing session with customers to reduce miscommunications and delays, which lowers resolution times.

• Account on-boarding - All Priority Support customers receive a detailed on-boarding email that contains all the details necessary to engage with our team. Additional troubleshooting guidelines, best-practices, and steps to help expedite ticket triage and resolution

Support Includes

• Incident Support - Identifying and troubleshooting problems in the system
• Root cause analysis
• Assistance with issues during installation
• Assistance with issues during upgrades
• Identifying and creating needed bug reports
• Guidance around implementation and configuration
• Integration support with other Crossbill products

Supported Platforms

You can have confidence that our supported platforms are well tested and we will work to correct issues. Crossbill will not provide assistance with configuration in unsupported environments. See the pages below for detailed information on what platforms are supported with Crossbill products:

Support limitation on Docker

We support the Crossbill Docker templates and can help with Crossbill product-related problems. We do not provide support for Docker itself or problems with any Docker environment.

Support limitation on Kubernetes

We support the Crossbill Kubernetes helm chart and can help with Crossbill product-related problems. We do not provide support for Kubernetes itself or problems with any Kubernetes environment.

Fixing Bugs

• Crossbill Support will help with workarounds and bug reporting
• Critical bugs will generally be fixed in the next maintenance release
• Non critical bugs will be scheduled according to a variety of considerations

Critical priority is defined as "production application down or major malfunction causing business revenue loss or high numbers of staff unable to perform their normal functions." This includes security issues.

End of Life Policy

Crossbill supports major versions for two years after the first major iteration of that version was released (for example, we support Crossbill Cone 1.1.x for 2 years after Crossbill Cone 1.1.0 was released).

For versions that are supported, customers can raise issues via https://crossbillsoftware.com/en/Bugs/. If a bug is discovered, it will be prioritised based on our Bug Fixing Policy and may require you to upgrade to the version which includes the fix. For critical security bugs, please see our Security Bugfix Policy on which versions we will back port critical security fixes to. 

Eligibility and Software Maintenance

Software maintenance covers access to support and software product updates for the corresponding software license. Refer to your applicable Cloud Terms of Service or Software License Agreement for specific terms of agreement. 

After the active maintenance period expires:

• Products utilizing a server license will continue to function, but you will no longer be able to access support or software updates (including security bug fixes).

• Products utilizing a Data Center license will enter a read-only mode and you will no longer be able to access support or software updates (including security bug fixes).

Note that starter licenses include community support only.

Support is open to system administrators and account holders. End-users will be redirected to a system administrator.

Knowledge Prerequisites

Administering Crossbill products requires a baseline technical skill set, including but not limited to:

• Comfort running SQL commands and installing a database. It's best if you have a good DBA for database troubleshooting and administration.
• Comfort installing and maintaining production web technologies

Customers are responsible for administering and upgrading their own installations. Crossbill Support will provide guidance on how to do this, but we will not be able to provide step by step maintenance and installation. If you require further assistance with this level of implementation, please consider the following resources:

• Crossbill Partners

Help with Unsupported Issues

Community

The Crossbill Answers is a great channel for discussions outside the bounds of the Crossbill Support offering. Below are some of the areas covered in the Crossbill Community.

Partners

If you need additional help, contact one of our Crossbill Partners (our 3rd party value added resellers) who offer a wide range of professional services, training, customizations and paid support. 

Third-Party Product Integration

Crossbill products interface with a variety of technologies. Front-end solutions like Web Servers (eg Nginx), load balancers, single sign-on solutions (SSO), SSL certificates, and LDAP repositories add functionality that is often critical to functioning of our products.

Crossbill will endeavour to provide documentation for integration with these 3rd party applications but does not provide support for 3rd party applications. We are unable to provide support when a failure in a 3rd party application occurs.

Third-Party Cloud Environments

Crossbill Server products can be deployed in a variety of 3rd party public cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE) or Microsoft Azure. These environments can offer such services as dedicated image storage, caching mechanisms, load balancers, auto scaling, and network configuration which all add functionality that is often critical to the functioning of our products.

Crossbill will endeavour to provide documentation for utilising these 3rd party environments and services but does not provide support for these 3rd party environments and services themselves. We are also unable to provide support when a failure in a 3rd party environment or service occurs.

We recommended consulting our documentation regarding the minimum resource sizing of 3rd party cloud environments and services running Crossbill applications as ample provisioning can guarantee the best customer experience. In cases where Crossbill has provided deployment templates for 3rd party cloud environments and services we will endeavour to troubleshoot the template is functioning as intended. If such templates are altered and used differently to those Crossbill has provided, Crossbill Support may not be able to provide support for these alterations.

Marketplace Apps

Crossbill offers support for certain apps as explained in our Crossbill Supported Apps page. For unsupported apps, issues should be raised with the provider of the app. Each app's supported status is listed on its page in the Crossbill Marketplace.

Beta and Development Releases

Crossbill does not offer support for milestone or beta releases, but we do support release candidates. These will be tracked with the terminology 'RC' in the version title.

Databases and Application Servers

Servlet Containers and Databases are integral technologies; without them Crossbill products cannot function. We provide integration instructions for getting our products to work on supported platforms, but we do not support configurations that differ from the procedures described in our product documentation.

Customization and Development Requests

There are many ways to customize and extend our products. We provide source access, APIs, remote interfaces, plugin frameworks, scripting languages, and tools that allow users to add or change CSS rules, HTML, and JavaScript real-time. However, our support for use of these customization options is limited.

If you're working to extend or customize our products and encounter a problem, Crossbill support are happy to help document the problem and relay information to our development teams as follows:

1. We can help you verify whether our code is working as intended and document any bugs.
2. If we provide examples of how to make customizations in our documentation, we will work to make sure that documentation is up-to-date.
3. For in-depth questions about implementing customizations, we will refer customers to our answers network or partner network.

SQL Queries

Modifying data

Crossbill does not support customers performing direct data manipulation of application databases via queries such as INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE, as they can easily lead to data integrity problems. If Crossbill encounters manipulation or customizations at this level, we may ask customers to restore data from their last known working state, or to engage an Expert to help recover their instance to a supportable state. If you are confident your UPDATE or INSERT is safe and your change management system is reliable, refer to the specific product's database documentation.

Fixing problems

In the event that there are data integrity problems due to defects in a product, Crossbill will provide workarounds or solutions to these problems that may involve SQL queries. We use SQL-based solutions as a last resort.

Reporting

Using SQL for business intelligence is beyond the scope of Crossbill Support. Some of our products have a community page for database queries. Please help us as well as the community by contributing your knowledge! 

Deployment Planning Activity

Planning for rolling out our products or capacity planning for large instances is better suited for professional services offerings than Crossbill Support. We will refer this kind of activity to our partner network. This includes establishing specific upgrade and deployment plans for existing installations.

New Feature Requests

See Implementation of New Features Policy for a detailed discussion.