Volt Active Data Support and Maintenance Policy for Volt Customers

This document refers to Volt Active Data Product release, Support Policy, Maintenance Policy and End-of-Life Policy.

Volt Support Overview

Volt Active Global Support addresses production systems only.  

Issues that occur on pre-production, testing or development systems are addressed via Volt Active Customer Success Management (CSM) team.  They can be reached via the ticketing system link listed below and selecting the Customer Success Form.

Support Hours

Volt Support business hours are 8am-6pm Eastern Time.

For 24×7 support for Severity 1 (Critical) Production Issues ONLY – please call us at +1 339-298-2023.

You will be asked to provide the following information:

• Customer Contact Name and Phone number
• General description of issue being experienced

After calling, please also open a ticket at https://support.voltactivedata.com completing all necessary fields and providing, at a minimum, volt logs and volt statistics.

Contacting Volt Support

For all issues, a ticket must be opened with Volt Active Data (“Volt”).  This can be done by registering for web access and opening a ticket at https://support.voltactivedata.com.  The ticket can be for Global Support or for Customer Success Management (CSM) team.

The ticket should provide the following information:

• Description of the event
• Date and time of the event (including time zone)
• Description of any steps already taken to resolve it
• Any actions that were taken prior to the event occurring
• Any relevant log files, stack traces, or other artifacts that may assist in diagnosis
• Fill out the information needed in the ticket e.g., volt version, end customer, bare metal or container, test/dev/production environment

Volt provides documentation to direct customers (“Licensee”) to assist on simple troubleshooting methods, how to gather log files and stack traces.  These can be found in two places:

• Online documentation of Volt product: https://docs.voltactivedata.com
• Support Knowledge Base with additional information about Volt product: https://support.voltactivedata.com/hc/en-us

Technical Support Responsibilities
The following table defines the responsibilities of technical support. 

Responsibilities	Description
Licensee	Monitoring of Volt product Identify an issue; determine the severity (clarify the business impact, e.g. revenue lost) and gather information on the issue and contact Volt support Validate the details against knowledge base and documented faults Perform Simple troubleshooting & remedial actions Note any actions taken prior to the incident e.g., any maintenance performed on the database, application, hardware or network) Note any remedial actions taken and the results of those actions Determine if further information and evidence are required and communication of request for same Design and implementation of Workaround if available Contact Volt for assistance if actions taken were not successful or if there are questions as a result
Volt Support	Review the incident and the data supplied Verify the data Determine if further information and evidence are required and communicate request for same as needed Provide a relief to return system to BAU Advanced troubleshooting recommendations Advanced workaround design Highly specialized technical skills from a specific core product group or professional services implementations group to assist in the resolution of issues owned by Volt Specialized troubleshooting recommendations Development & Notification of Resolution Update release Management of Problem to Resolution

Data Collection

Data collection and its timely delivery to Volt is the responsibility of the Licensee.  

Minimum data requirements for tickets should include the following:

• Date and time of the incident
• All logs should be captured and sent using the same time criteria
  • Logs should start from just before the incident and from all nodes in the cluster
  • For XDCR issues, volt logs from all the nodes on XDCR clusters also required
• Crash file (when available)
• Volt Statistics
• Actions taken prior to the incident
• Actions and their outcomes taken as a result of the incident

Data should be sent to our Securefiles website:

https://securefiles.voltactivedata.com/dropzone/helpdesk

Escalation Process

Volt’s Escalation Process is our way of establishing a working relationship with our customers in the rare instance we cannot resolve an issue within a timely manner.

Every effort will be made by the Support team to work efficiently and effectively to provide fast relief.  Support will be the coordination ambassadors that engage any and all resources within Volt to assist in providing relief and resolution.

If the issue is unable to be resolved in a timely manner, the next stage is to work with the Licensee and to develop an action plan that would include, but not be limited to:

• Agreement on regularly scheduled calls.  These can be daily, for issues in production, or at a lower frequency, if the issue is not pressing
• Setup of a similar cluster at Volt or Licensee facilities to replicate the problem in a lab, potentially using Licensee’s actual catalog and software
• Review by Volt of the Volt cluster installation, including review of deployment, system environment, source code for and stored procedures, etc.
• Access to systems – through sharing technology 
• Upgrades to Volt with interim updates that aid in debugging (e.g. extra logging) and/or fix issues as they occur
• Additional logging or monitoring using system tools (e.g. sar, iostat) or custom Volt monitors

Support Severity Level Definitions

Volt recognizes three (3) levels of severity.  Within each severity category, there is an understanding of timeliness in three (3) parts:  

Initial Response: Non-automated contact through email or phone from Volt Support in response to an issue raised by the Licensee.

Relief: Any reasonable work-around, correction, improvement, extension or other change recommended or made by Volt in response to a specifically reported problem that allows Volt product to run without affecting business operations.  At this point, Volt reserves the right to downgrade the Severity level with agreement from the Licensee.

Resolution: If the resolution is corrected with an update release, the release will go through testing and quality process at Volt prior to being released to the Licensee which allows for the correction to be included in subsequent releases. If resolution is a result of a configuration change, this will be documented in the ticket and if applicable, a knowledge base article will be produced.

Severity	Description	Response	Relief	Resolution
Severity 1: Critical	Critical Business Impact: Licensees production use of Volt products in production environment is stopped or so severely impacted that the Volt products cannot reasonably continue to work.  A wo rkaround is not successful. Licensee resources must be made available in Severity Level 1 situations and reasonably cooperate with Volt to resolve the issue. Severity Level 1 problems could have the following characteristics: Complete system outage System hang or crash situation Data loss or data corruption Critical functionality not available Severity Level 1 issues should be reported via telephone in the first instance followed by opening a ticket.	1 hour	4 hours	30 Days
Severity 2: Major	Potential Critical  Business Impact: Licensee’s production use of Volt products in production environment, are operating in a partial state; potential to become a full outage is imminent; degraded performance or loss of k-safety.  Severity Level 2 problems could have the following characteristics: Loss of node in a cluster Loss of XDCR connectivity Product error or failure forcing a restart or recovery Functionality unavailable but the system is able to operate in a restricted fashion	2 hours	8 hours	45 Days or Next Release
Severity 3: Minor	Minimal Business Impact: Minor functions/features are easily avoided or a workaround exists while the product is still usable. Severity Level 3 problems could have the following characteristics: Error message with workaround Minimal performance degradation Incorrect product behavior with minor impact Initial installation or development milestones are at risk	1 business day	7 business days	Scheduled release

 

Requests for product enhancements, suggested improvements should be directed to product@voltactivedata.com.

Software Maintenance

Licensees have access to all supported versions of Volt software, including  new versions, for the term of their Support Agreement.

Product Release Definitions

Volt classifies and numbers releases according to the definitions below. All releases contain cumulative updates and features from the release before them, unless noted in the release notes.  

For Severity 1 cases, Volt may provide an Update Release if needed to resolve the issue. 

Release Type	Version # Example	Description
Major Release	V12.0	A major release contains significant new functionality and defect fixes and may require adjustment to applications, deployments and scripts in order to upgrade. A major release may also include removal of previously deprecated features.
Minor Release	V12.2	A minor release contains some new features and defect fixes while maintaining backwards compatibility within that major version. A minor release may announce the deprecation of features.
LTS** Release	V12.3	For each major release, one point release is chosen as the LTS version which will have all critical defect fixes and security fixes applied and updated through the lifetime of that version.
Update Release	V12.3.6	An update release contains critical defect fixes and security fixes and will maintain backwards compatibility. An update release may contain minor updates to existing functionality.

 

** LTS (Long Term Support) is a version of software that is available to Licensees for a period of three years to allow them to plan and schedule upgrades – see End-of-Life Policy below for Versions, Release Dates and EOL Dates.