General Guidelines

1. Technical support and maintenance of the System are carried out by the Contractor's employees on the basis of the Contract. 

2. The reason for providing technical support is a ticket submitted by the Customer. Tickets are processed within the special system at Latera's website (http://support.hydra-billing.com/). In case the system is unavailable tickets are to be submitted via email (support@hydra-billing.com).

3. The Contractor's business hours:

1. On weekdays from 10 to 19 Eastern European Summer Time (GMT +3)

2. Off on weekends (Saturday and Sunday) and bank holidays (official bank holidays) 

4. The Contractor provides 2nd line tech support. Current issues concerning operating the system are solved by the Customer's team. Therefore, the Customer is to have trained personnel and an employee responsible for the 1st line tech support (operator's queries on current works within the system, solving minor issues).

5. Customer support stands for consulting on the matters of setup, configuring and using the system for certain practical tasks.

6. Tech support excludes fault diagnosis for the Main DB server operation. 

7. When creating a ticket the Customer should specify its priority for the Contractor's employees to identify the criticality of the issue which influences the reaction time.

8. Priority can be set only to tickets of the Incident type (see below). For other types of tickets, priorities are ignored by the Contractor and can be automatically changed.

9. Ticket priorities should be determined strictly in accordance with the operating procedure. Otherwise, the Contractor has the right to change the priority assigned by the Customer.

10. The Contractor has the right to ignore a request which is not properly submitted as a ticket or is submitted with some violations of the operating procedure.

11. Processing any ticket outside business hours is charged at double rate and requires verification from both parties.

12. In case of an issue that can be classified as Urgent, you need to create a ticket as soon as possible. After doing so, please urgently call at +1 (256) 474-85-86, ext. 200.

13. Releasing updates and new versions

    1. Every now and then, Latera company releases immediate updates and new versions of the system to be set up which allow fixing bugs in the system operation and adding new features.

    2. Updates and new versions of the system are granted to the Customer strictly on the basis of the Software Support and Maintenance Contract

    3. Updates and new versions of the system are set up by the Contractor and upon prior coordination with the Customer.

    4. Updates and new versions setup are rated as hours of tech support. It usually takes from 1 to 3 hours.

Definitions and descriptions

1. Rules for determining the ticket types:
   1. Task — the Customer’s request to the Contractor to execute certain operations to the Software, excluding the activities specified in other types of Tickets. For example, such operations concern the Software maintenance, data extraction, transformation, and modification.
   2. Incident — the Software operation failure which causes the Customer’s business processes failure, so that the Customer is not able to eliminate the failure by their own efforts and within a reasonable timeframe, and requires an intervention of the Contractor’s engineers for resolution, prevention or cleaning up its consequences for the Software operation.
   3. Bug — the Software malfunction occurring while the settings are correct and the Contractor’s recommendations are followed, when one or several functions executed by the Software and defined in the manual, or, without such a description - depending on the way these functions worked in the previous version of the Software, are affected as a result of an error of the Software program code.
   4. Feature request — the Customer’s suggestions for the Software features improvement.
   5. Consultation — the Customer’s questions on the Software operation, which require the Contractor’s clarifications.
2. Rules for assigning priorities to incidents:
   1. Urgent — a complete or partial Software failure, which either causes the Customer’s failure of provision of services to more than 10% of their customers, or a complete unavailability of the Software to the Customer’s staff, or the Software data loss or damage, so that it is impossible to recover the data from that stored in the Software.
   2. High — the failure affects the main business processes of the Customer without halting them; the Software is operative for the most part. There is an alternative, but more labor-intensive way to execute the business processes.
   3. Medium — the failure either affects the Customer’s minor business processes or in a minor way affects the main business processes.
   4. Low — the failure either does not affect the Customer’s business processes, or there is an alternative way to execute the business processes, which is not more labor-intensive compared to the normal operation.
3. Description of the ticket processing workflow: 
   1. As soon as the Customer creates a new ticket it is enqueued to be executed with the «In process» status.
   2. The ticket is assigned to a certain employee of the Contractor.
   3. In case there are any questions concerning the ticket, an assignee can change the status of the ticket to «Pending». I.e. further execution of the ticket requires a response from the Customer. 
      1. If there is no response from the Customer within 5 days a notification about the awaiting response is forwarded by email.
   4. If  there is no response from the Customer within 10 days the ticket becomes «Resolved».
   5. When all the necessary internal works are completed for the ticket, with further system update to be performed by the Customer the assignee changes the status of the ticket to «To update».
      1. The ticket automatically becomes «Resolved» when it has had the «To update» status for more than 28 days.
   6. When processing the ticket is completed the assignee changes its status to «Resolved» or «Pending» depending on the necessity of the further interaction.
   7. 5 days after resolving the ticket it automatically becomes «Closed».

Helpdesk Ticketing Rules

1. Helpdesk Ticketing Rules are approved by the Contractor. The Customer is to review them at http://wiki.hydra-billing.com/.

2. All of the Customer's employees are to review the rules before starting to work with tickets.

3. Both the Contractor and the Customer are to check their email boxes regularly for new notifications from http://support.hydra-billing.com/ and to participate actively in discussions.

4. Before submitting a ticket to the tech support please make sure to study all available data concerning the issue in the documentation, and also check if there is already an open ticket with the similar contents.

5. When contacting tech support, please submit your questions as clear as possible and provide detailed descriptions of your issues.

6. When contacting the Contractor, the Customer representative gets a unique ticket number. The identifier should be used whenever contacting the Contractor representatives on this matter.

7. For prompt solutions and for saving time, a bug ticket should contain the fullest and most detailed information on it:
   
   • The installation address and the database name where the bug was detected.
   • A step by step description of actions for the bug reproduction.
   • Hyperlinks to web forms where the bug is reproduced (if applicable).
   • A screenshot or a screen record (if applicable).
   • A print template (if applicable).
   • A log file fragment (if applicable).
8. For prompt resolving of tickets that are not dealing with any bugs please provide the fullest and most detailed information on the task:
   
   • The reason an entity needs to be unlocked (if it is necessary to unlock it for editing).
   • Links to correlated tickets, similar previously resolved tickets, or a link to the Contractor's employee who you already discussed the task with.

9. It is preferable to submit the question in the terms used in the system.

10. Screenshots, log files, and other files must be attached to the ticket.

11. The ticket layout and comment are to correspond to minimum necessary requirements: use tags to mark quotes, lists and headings.

12. Each separate task is to be submitted as a separate ticket. If during a discussion of a task some new topics or tasks arise please create a separate ticket for each of them. Also, please avoid creating bulky tickets on major matters (for example, on integration via API, etc.) — in the end, they typically become too difficult to deal with.

13. For tickets that require dealing with several task step by step, you need to create separate tickets.

14. For various tasks that have mutual reasons or topics, etc., you are to create separate tickets connecting them with links in the body of the ticket or in comments.

15. In case some issue repeats and is already described in one of the open tickets there is no need to create a new ticket. Please add a comment on the repeated issue to the already existing ticket.

16. If according to the Customer a task is resolved the Customer is to change the ticket status to «Closed». If the Customer has any questions on the «Resolved» ticket it is necessary to add them to the ticket as a comment.

17. In case an issue repeats, and the ticket for it is already «Closed» for more than 10 days it is prohibited to re-open it. Please create a new ticket according to the present rules.

18. The Contractor has the right to ignore a request which contains profanity and/or insults to the Contractor's employees.

19. In case a new Customer's employee needs an account created in the Helpdesk, an authorised Customer's employee has to either create a request containing new employee's full name and email address or to write an email to support@hydra-billing.com.