Support and Service Level Policy Addendum

Last revised: 25 Jan, 2023

This Ably Support and Service Level Policy Addendum (“Support Policy”) is an addendum to the Ably Terms of Service (in which case “you” is the Customer and “we” refers to Ably Realtime Ltd. (“Ably”)), or the Ably Master Solution Agreement, as applicable, and Order (“Agreement”), and describes Ably’s policy regarding support and SLA offering. Ably will provide technical support for the Ably Solution in accordance with this Support Policy and the Agreement. Customer will receive the level of support as set out in the applicable Order (“Support Level”). However, Ably may provide more limited support for free trial and evaluation use of the Ably Solution in its discretion. 

Ably reserves the right at its discretion to propose modifications to this Support Policy periodically. Ably will notify Customer of such changes via an email sent to the email address Ably has on file for Customer or via other notification mechanisms. Customer's continued use of and access to the Ably Solution after notice of such modifications indicates Customer's acceptance of and agreement to the modified Support Policy.

Capitalized terms not defined in this Support Policy have the meaning given to them in the Agreement (including its associated addenda, policies and other terms referenced therein).

1. Support Services. Subject to Customer’s compliance with the Agreement, including payment obligations, Ably will provide the following Support Services to the extent set forth in the Order:

  • 1.1 Ably will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide support for Customer’s use of the Ably Solution, consistent with Table A below and the Support Level.

  • 1.2 All support incidents and error reports will be in a format specified by Ably, and will include all information requested by Ably in order to reproduce and diagnose the problem. Ably will only honour the response times for issues that are raised through the documented issue escalation procedures available in the customer support dashboard at https://www.ably.com/support.

  • 1.3 Customer represents and warrants that Customer has full right and authority to disclose to Ably any authorized user or third party data or information for Support Services purposes.

  • 1.4 Prior to initiating any support request of any kind, Customer must first have attempted to determine the cause of and resolve the issue directly with the authorized user in question. Only if the issue cannot be resolved after reasonably diligent efforts by capable and skilled IT personnel retained by Customer may Customer then initiate a support request with Ably as specified in this section. Customer will use reasonable efforts to reproduce the problem and gather all relevant and helpful information.

  • 1.5 Ably will use commercially reasonable efforts to correct as soon as possible any delay, defect, failure or unavailability of the Ably Solution.

  • 1.6 Ably may provide other services as set forth in the Order, including training or set-up assistance.

  • 1.7 Ably will implement for Customer’s benefit all upgrades, enhancements, ports, bug fixes, and new releases to the Ably Solution when and if, in Ably’s discretion, developed by Ably. Ably will use commercially reasonable efforts to perform scheduled maintenance during off hours so as to minimize disruptions. In the event of any unscheduled or emergency maintenance, Ably will make reasonable efforts to minimize the impact on Customer, but cannot guarantee no negative impact on use in the event of such unscheduled or emergency maintenance.

Table A 


Free

PAYG

Standard Committed Use

Enterprise Committed Use

SLA

None

99.999% SLA and 10x SLA accelerator

99.999% SLA and 25x SLA accelerator

99.999% SLA and 100x SLA accelerator

Support Channels

Community, chat 

Community, chat, email 

Prioritized community, chat, and email, scheduled virtual meeting 

Prioritized community, chat, and email, Slack channel, scheduled virtual meeting 

Support Hours

Best effort

9am to 5pm (GMT and ET)

9am to 5pm (GMT and ET)

24 x 7 x 365

Guaranteed Response Time

Best effort

1 business day

4 business hours

1 hour

Critical Incident Escalation

None

None

None

<15 minutes, 24X7X365

Architecture Consultation

None

None

Onboarding general principles guidance

Custom use-case onboarding & ongoing architecture reviews

Direct Support Team

None

None

Commercial Account Manager

Advisory Customer Success Service

Commercial account manager

Direct engineer access

Dedicated CSM


2. Service Level Agreement

  • 2.1 Exclusive Remedy. This SLA: (a) states Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy and Ably's sole obligation and liability in the event of any delay, outage, error, fault, failure or unavailability of the Ably Solution for any reason; (b) applies only if the Ably Solution is subject to downtime or outage per section 2.2 below; and (c) applies only if the Order specifies that this SLA applies. If Customer elects to decline Support Services consisting of provision of this SLA, Customer acknowledges that Ably will have no liability or obligation in the event of any delay, error, fault, failure or unavailability of the Ably Solution for any reason.

  • 2.2 Warranty. Subject to section 2.5 below, Ably warrants solely to Customer that the Ably Solution will achieve uptime reflected in Table A associated with the Support Level. The term "uptime" as used in this section means general availability of the intended functionality of the Ably Solution with no outages. The term "outage" means a channel, API, connection, or message outage, subject to section 2.5.

  • 2.3 SLA. As Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy, and Ably’s entire liability, for failure to comply with the uptime warranty of section 2.2 above, Ably will issue to Customer "Service Credit(s)", defined as a monetary credit, as set out in the table in section 2.6 below, against subscription fees due for the next full month following the month in which warranty noncompliance occurred. Service Credits will be granted upon confirmation of entitlement. Service Credits are not transferable and may be redeemed only against future payments otherwise due to Ably. A pending Service Credit does not release Customer from Customer’s payment obligations under the Agreement or obligations to pay Ably invoices in full when due.

  • 2.4 Process. In order to receive Service Credits, Customer must notify Ably within thirty days from the first occurrence of warranty non-compliance, via email to [email protected]. This notification must include the dates and times of alleged unavailability, including request logs that corroborate the claimed outage.

  • 2.5 Exclusions. Entitlement to Service Credits will not apply, and Ably will have no responsibility or liability under this SLA, in the following circumstances: (a) Scheduled Downtime; (b) downtime caused by concurrent or consecutive failures, or failures at multiple locations, impacting the performance of internet services, networks or traffic exchange or control points controlled by entities other than Ably, including denial-of-service or other network attacks; (c) downtime caused by Customer’s or end users’ acts, omissions, connections or equipment, or by Other Applications; (d) if the Ably Solution becomes unavailable as a result of circumstances or causes beyond Ably’s reasonable control, including due to any force majeure event; (e) suspension or termination as permitted in the Agreement; or (f) suspension or termination as required by law, court, agency or governmental authority, for emergency reasons, or as needed in order to prevent or ameliorate violations or infringements of third party rights or applicable law.

  • 2.6 Service Credits.

    • Service Credit = ([monthly Ably Service subscription fee] x [outage period minutes] x [SLA accelerator] x [affected customer ratio]) ÷ minutes in the month

    • Outage period” is the number of minutes where the "affected customer ratio" is greater than minimum outage threshold; the "minimum outage threshold" is 0.4% (1 in 250).

    •  “SLA accelerator” is listed in the table below.

    •  “Affected customer ratio” is the greater of the following:

      • (total connection transactions affected by outage during the month) ÷ (total connection transactions in the month)

      • (total channel transactions affected by outage during the month) ÷ (total channel transactions in the month)

      • (total message transactions affected by outage during the month) ÷ (total message transactions in the month)

      • (total API transactions affected by outage during the month) ÷ (total API transactions in the month)

    • The minimum value of the affected customer ratio will be 5% (1 in 20) in the event of any outage lasting longer than the minimum outage threshold.

    • If the affected customer ratio is equal to or greater than 20% (1 in 5), the outage is treated as a complete service outage.

    • The maximum monthly Service Credit for any and all outages or downtime will not exceed 100%.

 

PAYG

Standard Committed Use

Enterprise Committed Use

SLA accelerator

10x

25x

100x

 

illustrative examples

outage duration

service credit (% of monthly fee)

0.5 mins

0.0

0.0

0.0

1 min

0.0

0.0

0.1

5 mins

0.1

0.3

1.0

10 mins

0.2

0.5

2.2

15 mins

0.3

0.8

3.3

30 mins

0.7

1.7

6.7

45 mins

1.0

2.5

10.2

1 hr

1.4

3.4

13.6

2 hr

2.7

6.8

27.3

4 hr

5.5

13.7

54.7

6 hr

8.2

20.5

82.1

8 hr

10.9

27.4

100.0

16 hr

21.9

54.8

100.0

24 hr

32.9

82.2

100.0

48 hr

65.7

100.0

100.0

96 hr

100.0

100.0

100.0