Basic, Advanced, and Premium support plans
You can choose a Basic, Advanced, or Premium support plan to customize your IBM Cloud® support experience for your business needs. The level of support that you select determines the severity that you can assign to support cases and your level of access to the tools available in the Support Center. If you want to upgrade your support plan, contact an IBM Cloud Sales representative.
Initial response Service Level Objectives (SLO) do not apply to any billing, invoice, or sales related inquiry or cases.
The following table shows the support types available for Pay-As-You-Go accounts, Subscription accounts, and the Enterprise Savings Plan billing model. For more information about accounts, see Account types.
Basic | Advanced | Premium | |
---|---|---|---|
Description | Basic business protection that is included with your IBM Cloud Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account | Prioritized case handling and support experience that is aligned with your business needs for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model | Client engagement that is aligned with your business outcomes to accelerate time-to-value for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model |
Availability | 24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases | 24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases, phone, and chat | 24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases, phone, and chat |
Case severity | Not applicable | Case severity ranking available | Case severity ranking available |
Initial response time objectives | Not applicable | Severity 1: Less than one hour Severity 2: Less than two hours Severity 3: Less than four hours Severity 4: Less than eight hours |
Severity 1: Less than 15 minutes Severity 2: Less than one hour Severity 3: Less than two hours Severity 4: Less than four hours |
Additional support | Not applicable | Not applicable | Technical Account Manager assigned Quarterly business reviews Access to experts |
Pricing | Included with cloud entitlement | Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at a minimum USD 200 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption |
Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at a minimum of USD 10,000 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption. For more information about support pricing, see Viewing your support costs. |
For Enterprise Savings Plans, there is a minimum commitment for Advanced and Premium support. If you don't spend the total committed amount by the end of the commitment term, you are invoiced for the amount that you didn't consume, and any amount used over the commitment is also charged. For more information, contact a IBM Cloud Sales representative.
Advanced support
Advanced support is for environments with a limited number of business-critical applications.
Basic support
Basic support is provided for non-production environments or workloads that don't require traditional severities and response times.
Support for Lite or Trial accounts
Users with a Lite or Trial account can create support cases but are limited to non-technical issues associated with access, billing & usage, account, and invoice or sales inquiries. For technical help if you have free support, Lite or Trial accounts can view the IBM Cloud documentation, chat with the Virtual Cloud Assistant, or use online communities such as the IBM Cloud Community or Stack Overflow.
Support level and enterprises
The level of support that is assigned to an IBM Cloud enterprise defaults to the highest support plan within the enterprise. All child accounts within the enterprise also default to the highest support plan.
Technical support team
IBM Cloud supports our customers with a worldwide team of experts that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These resources are at strategic IBM locations around the world. IBM Cloud support resources, which are known as the Advanced Customer Support team, is made up of technical engineers that have specific domain knowledge to triage and troubleshoot problems quickly and effectively.
The teams are organized by technology domains, which include compute, network, security, storage, VPC, Kubernetes service, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Satellite, databases, app development, and cognitive solutions. Our teams keep their skills and technical knowledge up-to-date through specialized training on cloud services throughout the year. Support engineers are equipped to go deep on issues and solve most without any additional support from our backend teams. Collaboration across cloud service teams ensures continuous knowledge transfer and skills development within the team to deliver the best possible service to our customers.