Get the most out of Subscription Services by understanding what is supported.

Subscription Services

1. What is Liferay Subscription Services?
2. How do I know what is covered and what is not covered under Subscription Services?
3. Where can I find more information about what is covered under Subscription Services?
4. What language(s) does Subscription Services offer support in?
5. I am trying to use instructions found on Liferay.com and they're not working. Is this officially supported?
6. What if my production environment went down because of a Third-Party technology or because of a change in configuration settings?

Issue Resolution

1. What incidents qualify as Severity 1 "High Priority"?
2. How do I resolve a production down situation?
3. What should I do if I have an incident that needs to be resolved before a specific deadline?
4. Is there something I can do to speed up resolution times?
5. Can Liferay Support resolve my issue on a call or screenshare?
6. Why is it so important for Liferay support engineers to replicate issues when I can demonstrate them in my environment?
7. What should I do if I cannot reproduce an issue in an uncustomized instance of Liferay?
8. Why do I need to close tickets?  Why are the Liferay support engineers closing tickets that I haven't confirmed to be resolved?
9. Why is there a limit on reporting only one issue per Help Center ticket?

 

Subscription Services

1.  What is Liferay Subscription Services?

Liferay Subscription Services includes support services and a wide range of resources to help you successfully plan, deploy, and manage your mission-critical projects from start to finish. As a customer, you can reference our exclusive knowledge resources, download the latest fixes or releases, request specific fixes that you need for issues in your project, and have access to Liferay support engineers to assist with Liferay DXP issues.

2.  How do I know what is covered and what is not covered under Subscription Services?

The general guideline is that Subscription Services should be viewed as product support. The product is designed with intended functionality and any behaviors or issues that conflict with the intended functionality will be verified and resolved.

3. Where can I find more information about what is covered under Subscription Services?

For specific details regarding support coverage please see our Support Coverage page. This includes information about covering issues such as upgrades, clustering, performance, and customer development.

4. What language(s) does Subscription Services offer support in?

Our global support team communicates with customers in one of the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin.  The designated language of support is dependent on the support region, as well as the line of support.

Please see the following article which outlines the designated languages of support for each global region and channel: Support Language Matrix

5.  I am trying to use instructions found on Liferay.com and they're not working. Is this officially supported?

Our official documentation and knowledge base are fully supported under Subscription Services. If you need to further verify how a particular feature is intended to behave, our Liferay support engineers will gladly assist you. Resources such as community and staff blogs, a community wiki, and forums are available, but not covered as part of Subscription Services.

6. What if my production environment went down because of a Third-Party technology or because of a change in configuration settings?

You should contact the third party technology's services since these are not related to Liferay's core product. You can also contact your Sales Representative to see if there are any other options available.

Issue Resolution

1.  What incidents qualify as Severity 1 "High Priority"?

The severity level of an incident is based on its business impact. A "High Priority" incident is one that either renders a production system severely impacted or completely shut down or causes system operations or mission-critical applications to be inoperable.

Expanding further:

• For an incident to be deemed "High Priority", it must be present on a production system operating in a production environment. If the incident is only present on a development or other non-production system, it cannot be deemed a "High Priority."
• A "High Priority" incident is an incident that, at minimum, causes a production system to be "severely impacted." A system is "severely impacted" when it is inoperable, the primary functionality of a production environment is inoperable, or the system is experiencing security issues that compromise the confidentiality, availability, or integrity of the system's resources. Some examples include:
  • Production system crashes because of a Liferay malfunction. A Liferay malfunction, memory leak, or concurrency issue causes the entire site to be very slow, to the point of being unusable.
  • 80% of the activity of a live site is on the message boards, and for some reason the users cannot access the message boards.
  • Publishing causes a serious performance degradation of the production system during an extended period of time.

*Please note that "High Priority" level in Help Center, correlates to "Critical" in the Enterprise Services Agreement.

2. How do I resolve a production down situation?

Your Subscription Services includes support for production down situations that are caused by Liferay product malfunctions. When you contact our Liferay support engineers about this issue, we prioritize getting your production server up and running again. This may require you to use a temporary workaround, restart the servers, or revert recent changes that may have caused the downtime. After the production environment has reached a more stable state, we will work on the long term fix. We will ask you to provide us with a phone number, timezone, and hours of operation to best reach you for a quick contact. When creating a Help Center ticket, please refer to this High Priority Issue Checklist for the information that Liferay Support will need to address the issue you are experiencing.

3.What should I do if I have an incident that needs to be resolved before a specific deadline?

Please make sure that our Liferay support engineers are aware of the urgency of the issue, so the ticket can be prioritized accordingly. If the proposed resolution time still does not fulfill your project's needs, we advise you to speak to your Sales Representative about other options to expedite the resolution of your requirements. (Please also refer to the article Enhanced Support Escalation Workflow).

4.  Is there something I can do to speed up resolution times?

The faster the issue replication time, the faster the resolution time. A majority of the time spent on a given ticket is dedicated towards reproducing and understanding the issue. When our Liferay support engineers do not have enough information to reproduce reported issues, it may result in a longer resolution time. The ideal situation is when you can reproduce the incident in an uncustomized instance of Liferay and provide those instructions to our support engineers. This would eliminate the possibility that the issue was caused by custom code or third party technology. During this testing process, you may discover that issues are actually not caused by Liferay DXP, so you would know sooner where to go for a resolution. 

Please see: Support Tickets - Best Practices

5. Can Liferay Support resolve my issue on a call or screenshare?

Liferay Support uses phone calls and virtual meetings in order to gather information about the reported issue. The goal of gathering this information is to reliably reproduce the reported issue and determine the root cause.

Liferay Support does not conduct live troubleshooting sessions with phone calls or virtual meetings.

6.  Why is it so important for Liferay support engineers to replicate issues when I can demonstrate them in my environment?

Reproducing an issue is the first step to providing a solution. Once we can consistently replicate the issue, we can narrow down the root cause and determine whether it is a product error, a configuration issue or a third party software malfunction. If the issue is determined to be a product error, our support engineers will need to debug the source code on their development environment, which is best done while reproducing the issue. Once a solution is ready, we will conduct tests to ensure that it indeed does fix the reported incident.

7.  What should I do if I cannot reproduce an issue in an uncustomized instance of Liferay?

You can still report the incident and ask our Liferay support engineers to guide you in reproducing the issue in an uncustomized version of Liferay. In the process you may discover that the issue is actually related to custom code or a third party technology. At times an issue is only reproducible under a certain type of load or other unusual circumstance, in which case you should let our support engineers know of these details. Your Sales Representative is also a great resource and will be available to assist you with issues that are not included under Subscription Services.

8.  Why do I need to close tickets?  Why are the Liferay support engineers closing tickets that I haven't confirmed to be resolved.

The primary reason for closing tickets when they are resolved is to preserve organization and prevent miscommunication. Two of the most common situations are:

• If more information is needed to continue working on an issue, and the ticket has not been updated for an extended period of time, we will temporarily "solve" the ticket.
• If the ticket was reported for multiple incidents or questions, we will open new tickets for each separate incident and continue by handling one issue per ticket. 

You are more than welcome to create another ticket to reference any closed ticket and we will pick up where we left off.

9.  Why is there a limit on reporting only one issue per Help Center ticket?

Liferay Support desires to limit the scope of each ticket to a single issue which will help ensure the following:

• A clear definition of a ticket lifecycle so you and Liferay Support can effectively track the ticket progression from initial diagnosis to resolution. Troubleshooting, next steps and communication are improved thus reducing the overall time spend by all parties on a ticket.
• An organized list of tickets that helps you and Liferay Support easily reference previously reported incidents specific to your project.
• Ticket history can now act as a private knowledge base where you can locate valuable information in an organized repository.