Support Guidelines

ARPACORP’S support coverage encompasses server and network management from physical servers via on-premise deployment to all virtual machines that are hosted via cloud regardless of their environment. Our goal is to keep a safe and secure environment which protects the overall confidentiality, integrity and availability of the whole client infrastructure. Any servers or application, physical or virtual which do not belong to the environment that we support are not included in this engagement.

In order to provide a well documented report of an issue, the new support guidelines for Incident, Problem and Change Management procedures will be as follows:

1. We will operate on a no-ticket, no support policy.
2. Do not open a ticket without making prior investigations of the issue.
3. Avoid copying entries from Facebook or other applications such as Microsoft Word as this will include the encoding. The best practice is to type your answers directly or prepare your answers in Notepad, Notepad++ to make sure that the encoding is UTF8.
4. All issues both minor and major pertaining to any of the server components and application must have a corresponding ticket. Avoid messaging our support team directly via Facebook or SMS as this will disrupt the support procedures.
5. The client’s Point of Contact (POC) must open a support ticket to our Facebook Virtual Assistant upon requesting for support. Our virtual assistant will automatically open a ticket via email and contact the assigned support via Voice, Email and SMS.
6. The client’s POC must have already made the prior investigation of the issue in order to formulate a correct risk assessment. Thus, understanding the appropriate assignment of severity and priority levels are required. See: //www.atlassian.com/incident-management/kpis/severity-levels.
7. Avoid opening tickets with vague and no substantial information included: E.g. “Cannot connect, cannot send, slow server, etc.”. Include a detailed analysis as possible. Screenshots, code snippets, logs, timestamps etc.
8. The ticket must be assigned correctly if it is a problem or an incident. Please see //www.atlassian.com/incident-management/devops/incident-vs-problem-management to understand the difference between the two.
9. All change requests (minor, major, emergency changes) pertaining to any component must have a corresponding ticket.
10. Change requests must be scheduled in accordance with the internal and external teams’ availability unless the change is an emergency change that needs to be performed due its severity.
11. All change requests must have a corresponding email approval from the client and the project’s management team.
12. Escalations will no longer be on the level of capability matrix. There will no longer be a Level 1, 2, and 3 for escalations. Our Facebook virtual assistant will automatically assign the ticket and notify the resource based on their assigned schedules.