AtScale Technical Services - Customer Guide

July 2024

This guide details how AtScale’s Technical Services team supports customers.  It is reviewed regularly and can be expected to change over time.  

Introduction and Welcome!

Welcome to the AtScale Technical Services team.  This document contains all the information you need about the Technical Services team.  If you have any feedback or further questions about this document, please contact Mike Carlino, Executive Vice President of Technical Services, at mike.carlino@atscale.com.

We can assist you with technical issues, questions, or complaints using the AtScale semantic layer platform. We will assist with pre-sales proof-of-concept (PoC) and demo activities, help your staff during your initial or ongoing use-case deployments, provide enablement and training services, troubleshoot errors and unexpected behaviors, and answer any questions that might arise in a development or production environment.  

If you require a thorough architectural discussion or assistance with data modeling, performance tuning, upgrades, or further educational services, we will arrange for an engagement with our Professional Services or Educational Services team. 

AtScale Service Levels

AtScale offers three different levels of service aligned with our pricing plans: Growth, Standard, and Enterprise.

AtScale Technical Services provides the following support channels:

• Direct access to the AtScale Technical Support team
• Indirect access to the AtScale Customer Engineering team
• Remote troubleshooting of errors, bugs, unexpected behaviors
• Remote assistance for questions about installation, configuration, designing data models, querying data, user and aggregation management, performance, and upgrades 
• Access to the AtScale Help Center, including product documentation, knowledge articles, the learning management system (LMS), and case management. 
• A channel for submitting enhancement and feature requests into our Product team
• A channel for submitting feedback / complaints
• Access to all AtScale software releases

The Technical Services Team

Our Solutions Engineering, Technical Support, Professional Services, and Educational Services teams operate as one unified team, with each offering the following services:

Solutions Engineering

• Leads technology demonstration/validation activities, including architecture discussions, product capabilities and requirements reviews, proposal requests, and the PoC processes.
• Ensures the PoC process is followed, including collecting all required information for the PoC Mutual Success Plan.
• Understands and aligns how AtScale fits with customer use cases and tools.
• Provides technical guidance throughout the customer journey, enabling the customer to realize maximum gains from AtScale deployments.

Technical Support

• Troubleshoots specific issues logged as support cases, including bugs, errors, and unexpected behaviors and questions that can happen in development and production environments
• Supports the following issues: installation, configuration, designing data models, querying data, managing users and aggregates, performance, and upgrades  
• Addresses specific ‘how-to’ questions and provide advice and guidance on AtScale features and functions
• Assists all work performed remotely by AtScale support engineers in partnership with a customer support contact
• Note: The Technical Support team doesn’t install, design, track performance, or provide upgrade services. Instead, the Professional Services team handles these services.

AtScale Technical Support Team Structure

AtScale Technical Support utilizes a two-tier system for resolving customer issues.  We have a frontline team where front-end support engineers watch the incoming support case queue to ensure that we respond to issues within our defined service-level agreements (SLAs) and a backline team of experienced engineers who are ready to help with complex issues. Our highly qualified and responsive Customer Engineering team is ready and available to assist our Technical Support team with troubleshooting the most complex semantic layer issues and fixing bugs.

The tiers of Technical Support include:

Professional Services

The Professional Services team delivers project-based services that include: 

• Architecting a complete AtScale-based solution
• Installing, configuring, and upgrading an AtScale environment 
• Designing and building a data model based on the customer’s unique business process(es)
• Implementing use cases
• Implementing or integrating with user authentication and authorization solutions (delegated authorization, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Kerberos, clustering, and more)
• Running health checks on AtScale environments and tuning performance
• Assisting with the on-site or remote work that solutions architects and consultants perform
• Providing customer staff augmentation services

Educational Services

• Provides a variety of instructor-led training/enablement courses and workshops, either remotely or on-site
• Develops and maintains e-learning plans and on-demand course materials offered via the LMS

Definitions of Severity & Importance

Severity and importance are criteria that help AtScale to manage cases and ensure timely resolution. Since the customer determines both, they select the levels for each option when they open a case. Customers choose from the Severity field options from highest to lowest:

• S1: Production down. The AtScale system is down or not functioning, and a workaround doesn’t exist.
• S2: The production system is up and running but in a degraded or restricted capacity, or major functionality has been impacted.
• S3: This is a production system issue where minor functionality is impacted, or it might be a development /lower environment issue.
• S4: This is a request for information or a complaint.
  

Importance is a subjective measure that enables the customer to communicate the priority of a case concerning their business needs. Customers choose from the following categories for importance:

• Urgent: The default level of importance for S1 production-down support cases (not an option for S2, S3, or S4)
• High: Four-hour engagement expected (not an option for S4)
• Medium: Same-day engagement expected
• Low: Next-day engagement acceptable  

Initial Response SLA and Case Updates

AtScale Technical Support provides one Service Level Agreement (SLA) for initial response time.  Our commitment for an initial response is that the support case has been reviewed, assigned to a support engineer, and we’ve engaged you by phone, web share, or by communicating with you within the support case.   

After the initial contact, we’ll let you know what’s going on with the open support case by providing your current status and next steps during the life of the case, according to the table below.

Notification Matrix and Escalation Path

If a case needs to be escalated, the table below defines the levels of escalation and response times for the various case severity classes: 

Escalation path:

Reporting Issues by Logging Support Cases

Once your support contacts are set up to access the Help Center, they’ll be able to log, edit, and view support cases online.  

As an immediate first step, prior to opening a case, please be sure to take a moment to search the Help Center Knowledge Base (KB) for How-Tos, FAQs and other helpful resources.  There exists a ton of information whereby the customer can resolve their issue(s) without opening a case.

If you don’t find a resolution to the issue in the Help Center KB, please open a support case; one for each individual issue to ensure you receive the best support possible.

Setting up access to the Customer Support Portal

First Step – Identify Your Authorized Support Contacts 

With your AtScale Support Services Subscription, you are entitled to a fixed number of support contacts as defined in the AtScale Service Levels table in this document.  Please send email message to Brian Bastarache at brian.bastarache@atscale.com with the following information for each support contact and access will be granted:

•  Full Name (First and Last)
•  Company Email address
•  Work phone or cell phone (whichever is preferred)
•  Title
•  Time Zone

Second Step - Access the AtScale Customer Support Portal 

Once your support contacts are enabled, they will receive a welcome email to set their own password and gain access to the Customer Portal Support Channel. They will be able to log, edit, and view support cases online. The support contacts can access the Support Channel from the main page of the Help Center.

The Process to Open a Case

Log in to the Help Center, select the Support channel and then choose Open a New Case. The following form appears once you open a new case.

Please be sure to fill in all of the fields and provide as much information as possible about the issue. 

Provide information in the Description field (e.g., Can the issue be reproduced? Has anything in your environment changed?) to help expedite the resolution process.  Also, please provide a support bundle with every new case. 

Reference: How to Upload Files to the AtScale Support Upload Portal 

With complex cases, we first focus on reproducing the issue in our own lab environment. This allows more extensive testing to be performed without impacting the customer's work schedule. It might be necessary to ask the customer to provide additional information for additional tests. 

If you open an S1: production down issue:

• Please follow up after submitting your support case by calling our dedicated AtScale Technical Support line at 650.446.3268.    
• If you don’t reach a live support engineer, please leave a voicemail. We will contact the on-call engineer.