Percona Subscription Policies

How do I use Support as a part of the Percona Subscription?

Support is provided 24x7x365 worldwide for subscribers. You can contact Percona engineers via telephone, instant messaging, email, and our Customer Portal depending on your support tier. See contacting support for ways to open a support incident.

Percona prioritizes support requests based on incident priority in order to ensure that customers experiencing severe production outages are restored to service as soon as possible. Real-time contact methods such as telephone and instant messaging should be reserved for critical situations that demand and directly benefit from immediate feedback.

Which servers should I include in my Percona subscription?

For each application for which you intend to receive support, Percona requires that you include all production database servers that store the data related to this application (Percona XtraDB Clusters and MongoDB clusters that use an arbiter node and don’t hold data do not have to be included). This allows us to assist you with covered support requests before those issues cause production outages, and it protects you by ensuring every server related to your business-critical applications receives timely responses to support requests.

If the application you wish to cover makes use of a complex configuration, such as multiple region DR or database clustering, we require that all servers that underpin that application be included in your support subscription. As an example, if you had a source-source cluster with a replica for performing backups and an identical environment in another region for DR, you would have to include all six servers in your support subscription to guarantee that Percona can provide support for any of the database issues that could arise. For customers with complex configurations or a large or dynamic overall server count, an unmeasured contract without counting servers may be a better option.

In addition to the above, Percona recommends that any servers that are used to provide testing, development, or staging environments for your organization related to the covered applications also be included. Covering these non-production servers allows us to help you stage and test database software upgrades or hot fixes, replicate issues outside of your production environment, and gather and analyze query metrics before potentially problematic changes go into your production environment. Please be aware that Percona can only provide assistance with servers that are covered as part of your subscription agreement.

What types of incidents are covered?

In a nutshell, we will fix covered software that is not working correctly, and coach you in specific tasks with which you require help. More specifically, we provide:

• Problem resolution support for the covered software, to diagnose and fix discrete problems with specific symptoms, when it is reasonable to believe that the problem is caused by the software’s misbehavior. Examples include server crashes and wrong results to queries.
• Advisory support answers your questions about how to use the covered software. For example, we can advise you with installation, upgrades, and backups; help you to understand how to use particular software features, and explain the purpose and behavior of a configuration option.
• Customers with consultative support can seek assistance with topics specific to your deployment, including assistance with writing or tuning queries and stored routines, optimizing schema definitions, indexing strategies, and server configurations for performance, and other similar tasks unrelated to product usage, service restoration, or bug fixing. Note that consultative support is not a replacement for dedicated Consulting engagements and is intended to resolve incidents that are well-defined with narrow scope.
• Some common topics for which customers use us include:
  • Advice on performance issues
  • Advice on operational best-practices
  • Advice on backup and recovery
  • Advice on advanced data recovery
  • Analysis of software bugs
  • Analysis of software crashes and outages
  • Analysis and advice on replication
  • Advice on high availability
  • Assistance with query tuning

What types of incidents are not covered?

The following types of incidents are excluded:

• Bug fixes for non-open-source versions of software (e.g. OEM-licensed MySQL, MongoDB Enterprise, etc.)
• Performing tasks for you, rather than advising you in your efforts to perform them. For example, we can coach you on how to configure replication, but we will not set up replication for you. If you need assistance in setting up replication, Percona Professional Services would be happy to assist.
• Open-ended requests, such as reviewing a server to find whether anything is wrong with it. This type of open-ended performance review or system audit is covered under a Percona Managed Subscription or Professional Services Audit. Each incident must be filed to resolve a pre-existing specific question or situation.
• Architecture and design advice, such as choosing a good scaling strategy. This type of request requires a deep analysis and review of your requirements and setup and is handled by a Professional Services architecture and design review.

What are the different priority levels and response times?

Priority 1 (urgent)
A problem that severely impacts your use of the software in a production environment (such as loss of production data or in which your production systems are not functioning). The situation halts your business operations, and no procedural workaround exists.

Priority 2 (high)
A problem where the software is functioning, but your use in a production environment is severely reduced. The situation is causing a high impact to portions of your business operations, and no procedural workaround exists.

Priority 3 (medium)
A problem that involves partial, non-critical loss of use of the software in a production environment or development environment. For production environments, there is a medium-to-low impact on your business, but your business continues to function, including by using a procedural workaround. For development environments, the situation is causing your project to no longer continue or migrate into production.

Priority 4 (low)
A general usage question, reporting of a documentation error, or recommendation for a future product enhancement or modification. For production environments, there is low-to-no impact on your business or the performance or functionality of your system. For development environments, there is a medium-to-low impact on your business, but your business continues to function, including by using a procedural workaround.

Response time commitments for each priority differ based on your support level. Refer to the relevant Support Tier page for your supported product:

• Support Tiers for MySQL
• Support Tiers for MariaDB
• Support Tiers for MongoDB
• Support Tiers for PostgreSQL
• Support Tiers for DBaaS

What platforms are supported?

Support itself is platform-independent. Your questions will be answered regardless of the OS you use. Bug fixes are provided according to this list of supported platforms.

What kinds of bugs will Percona fix?

Percona will fix bugs within Percona software subject to the Percona Software and Platform Lifecycle.

When requested, Percona will investigate possible bugs; for example, ones that cause crashing, freezing, incorrect results, data corruption, performance problems, or security breaches. Bugs must be verified via repeatable test cases.

Percona engineers can work together with you to create test cases. Collaboration with you is key for us to be able to verify and fix any bug that we are working on. We will work with you to collect analytics data and test potential workarounds.

With any issue reported to us, our number one goal is to restore service. When it comes to handling bugs, the quickest way to restore service and prevent downtime is often to provide a workaround (for example changing settings, changing sql, starting with special flags, etc.).

Fixing a bug is a complex and often time-consuming process. Sometimes it is not possible or feasible to fix a particular bug, but we will apply our best effort in good faith. If no fix is possible, we will seek a workaround instead.

Percona may merge bug fixes from newer versions to older versions of the software, or undo fixes that were added in newer versions if appropriate and technically feasible.

What is the difference between a bug fix and a hot-fix?

For Percona software, once we are able to repeat a bug and the development work is completed, a bug fix will be included in the next released version of the software and you will have to upgrade after the release to receive the fix.

Customers who request a hot-fix are entitled to a hot-fix build of the current version of Percona software with the fix applied as soon as development has completed the fix. This gives you access to critical bugs as soon as possible. Note: You will not have to upgrade server versions to receive the fix.

We are unable to guarantee that bug fixes will be incorporated into other flavors of the software, but bug fixes will always be contributed upstream to Oracle®, MongoDB and the PostgreSQL community to adopt freely if they so choose.

What is the timing of bug fixes in Percona software?

Bug fixes will be included in the next scheduled release that is open for code changes. This may not be the immediate next release because it may already be frozen or being built.

Hot-fixes are available more quickly, as they are created specifically to address the identified issue(s) and are based on the version you are currently running. This lets you keep using exactly the same version plus fixes to customer-reported bugs. Hot-fixes are created to get you a resolution as quickly as possible and therefore go through an accelerated release process.

We report bugs upstream wherever possible and work to leverage our relationship with the open source community, partners, and other vendors to find solutions for our customers. All bug fixes created by Percona are made available at no charge to the open source community and upstream vendors such as Oracle, MariaDB, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL so that the fixes may be incorporated into their versions of the software. However, the decision when or whether to incorporate those fixes is beyond the control of Percona.