MonetDB Solutions provides technical support services including Problem Resolution Support, Engineering Support and Consultative Support for the MonetDB software suite including all MonetDB server features in the official MonetDB releases, all officially supported MonetDB clients and MonetDBe (MonetDB embedded) via her JIRA Customer Support Portal (for short “JIRA portal”). This is accessible via https://monetdbsolutions.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals.
Each designated technical contact will receive a JIRA portal login (based on the associated email address) that can be used to report new JIRA support tickets, monitor ongoing tickets or review historical tickets. By default, one “Organisation” is created for a customer in the JIRA portal to include all technical contacts of this customer. All information and control of a JIRA support ticket are shared among the technical contacts under the same Organisation.
Changes regarding technical contact information, such as changing email addresses, and add/remove a technical contact to/from the customer’s organisation), and the need to separate the technical contacts of a customer into multiple (sub-)organisations can be directly communicated to support@monetdbsolutions.com.
With every JIRA ticket, the customer should also provide MonetDB Solutions additional resources necessary to resolve the corresponding ticket, including for instance application documentation that describes how MonetDB is used, SQL schema(s), queries and sample data. MonetDB Solutions should be able to access such information either through remote secure connection (e.g. using SSH) or on Company’s premises, to which data has been transferred through secure connection beforehand.
The focus of problem resolution support is helping to restore service (due to outages caused by crashes, data corruption, etc.), and assisting with command syntax, installation, configuration, upgrades, and other general product usage topics.
Engineering support includes bug fixes, hot patches, and topics that require communication with the product engineering team.
Bug fixes will be automatically included in the next MonetDB official release. Pre-release installers can be provided on demand. Support for pre-release installers can be provided until the next MonetDB release. Hot patches are provided to address critical failures and may not receive the full QA and regression testing performed on regular maintenance releases due to the urgent nature of the situation.
Consultative support covers issues that are specific to a customer’s deployment, such as performance tuning and best practice recommendations, rather than general product usage, service failures, or software defects.
It is intended for narrow, specific topics and is not a replacement for a dedicated, intensive consulting engagement to address systemic, architectural, or wide-ranging subjects.
MonetDB support engineers will provide assistance resolving performance problems caused by server configuration, "bad" queries, table definitions, indexing strategies, etc., and suggesting changes based on existing features and identifying alternative implementations suited to a particular environment.
MonetDB support engineers can conduct limited source code review for customers who want to extend MonetDB’s features through user-defined SQL functions. MonetDB support engineers can review source code to assist with following best practices and ensuring code correctness regarding the various client APIs, stored SQL and server extensions, recommending changes as necessary to support particular needs.
All support issues are assigned a Priority level in Jira reflecting the impact to production operations. This is set initially by the technical contact when reporting a new issue via the JIRA portal, and MonetDB support will help to ensure that the issue receives an appropriate rating:
A catastrophic problem that severely impacts the ability to conduct business. This means that production systems are down (completely non-responsive or not functioning) and no known workaround exists.
High impact problem in which production operations are disrupted but remain somewhat productive or have an available workaround.
Medium or lower impact problem that involves a partial loss of non-critical functionality. This may be a minor issue with limited or no loss of functionality or impact on production operations. This includes administrative requests and errors in the product documentation.
Low-level problem that does not significantly affect system function or operations.
In exceptional situations, MonetDB support may elect to assign an S1 or S2 Severity level for failures on non-production systems based on the overall business impact. MonetDB support may change the severity of an issue based on the guidelines above at the discretion of the assigned support engineer.
For S1 emergency production outages, customers may request that a MonetDB support engineer make contact to directly provide remote support. This can be done by means of telephone conversations or using teleconference applications and remote desktop/screen sharing methods. Resolving technical support issues generally requires analysis of system logs and other data that must be transmitted via email and file attachments to the support issue rather than by telephone. Including this information when reporting the support issue dramatically hastens the process of resolving the problem and restoring production functionality.
Customers may request escalation of a specific support issue by emailing support@monetdbsolutions.com from a registered email ID and supplying a suitable justification to update the priority.
Available escalations include:
The support services are applicable to the whole MonetDB software suite in the official MonetDB releases. More specifically:
Initial Response Time for MonetDB software suite
(#) According to Dutch business days, business hours 9:00 AM-6:00 PM CE(S)T.
The overall level of support available for a particular product and platform combination may vary from version to version.
Problem resolution support is available from the latest release back to one previous major release of the MonetDB software suite on the supported operating systems (see monetdb.org).
Engineering support is available on those platforms for which we produce supported product binaries for the latest release. Engineering support is unavailable for products or platforms that have reached their maintenance end of life. Custom feature development (Non-Recurring Engineering) is a separate service and is not included in Engineering Support. Contact info@monetdbsolutions.com to discuss possibilities.
Consultative Support is available for the MonetDB software suite from the latest release back to one previous major release on the supported operating systems (see monetdb.org).
Support for legacy versions of the MonetDB software suite so that no longer receive problem resolution support and engineering support may require an additional fee. Contact info@monetdbsolutions.com to discuss possibilities regarding support for legacy products.
Support for issues on an unsupported platform is limited to problems that can be reproduced on a supported platform (see monetdb.org). Examples of limited support include those platforms that have reached their maintenance end of life (such as RHEL 3 and Windows 2000 Server) and platforms for which we do not produce supported product binaries (such as FreeBSD).
MonetDB Solutions will make every commercially reasonable effort to work with other product and platform vendors to resolve issues affecting our supported products. This will incur an additional fee. Contact info@monetdbsolutions.com to discuss possibilities.