Working with Elastic Swiftype Support: Best Practices
What can I expect from Elastic Swiftype Support?
Our scope of support
Our Swiftype Standard and Pro support is a production level of support focused on making sure your Swiftype Engine is working as expected and available. To that end, we offer:
- Analysis of the state of your engine.
- Actions you can perform to stabilize or tune your engine.
- Updates on actions our Engineers are taking to stabilize your engine.
- Pointers to Swiftype documentation or forums if your question is outside the scope of the platform itself.
Swiftype Premium includes all of the above and additionally more in-depth implementation questions.
Our support response times and hours
| Subscription | Urgent (Level 1) | High (Level 2) | Normal (Level 3) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium | 4 Business hours | 1 Business Day | 2 Business Days |
| Pro | - | - | 3 Business Days |
| Standard | - | - | 3 Business Days |
Note: Business hours are 8AM-6PM Pacific Time
Cases
As the most common and frequent of activities, here are the best practices related to opening support cases with Elastic.
What is a case?
A case can go by many names: ticket, service request, incident, problem, issue, etc. As far as we're concerned, they all mean the same thing. We generally use the term "case" because that's what our support system provider calls them.
A case (or whatever term you prefer to use) can represent many different kinds of situations you'll encounter as a customer:
- You need help setting up your Swiftype account or engine.
- You would like a new feature considered.
- You have a question about how to do something with Swiftype.
All of these situations (and likely some we've missed) are valid case topics.
When should I open a case?
Now that we're on the same page about what a case is, let's talk about when to open one.
Generally speaking, you should open a case for anything important to you. It's just that simple. Cases are the way we communicate with each other a majority of the time, and we want to be well connected with you as a customer to ensure your success as well as our own. If in doubt, open a case to open the discussion.
How do I open a case?
This is pretty straightforward. Just send us an email at support@elastic.co from the email addresses registered on your account. You receive a confirmation email from our system letting you know your case was created, and all future conversation can occur just by replying to that email.
You can also log into our customer support portal at https://support.elastic.co. Note that the username / password will be different from your Swiftype console username and password.
Please note that you must be a named contact to access Swiftype support — reach out to your primary account holder to request that you be added as a named contact.
What should I say in my case?
There are two key pieces of information you can give us in your email:
- The Primary email address for your account.
- The engine name you're asking about (you may have several)
- The nature of the problem
Tell us as much about the problem you're facing as possible, and we will do the rest.
Severity: We offer 3 severity levels: Urgent (1), High (2), and Normal (3)
Note: Severities 1-2 only apply to Swiftype Premium.
We have fairly standard definitions for what these mean:
Urgent: Your production environment is not working or seriously impaired and no workaround is available. Your revenue, security or brand is at risk.
High: Your environment is functioning but software is impaired and working in a reduced capacity, or an imminent deadline is at risk. Your revenue, security or brand is potentially threatened.
Normal: This is the default severity level. Something isn't working as expected, or you have a general question about your deployment.
Phone Support
We’ve covered opening a case, which is the most common way we communicate with customers. But sometimes you need to actually speak with a human being in real time, especially when the problem you’re experiencing is either very complex and/or very time sensitive in nature. Our Premium subscription level offers phone as a channel of support, so in this section we’ll tell you how to use it.
If my subscription level includes phone access, how do I make use of it?
If you have a Premium subscription, you are entitled to phone access. Congratulations! To make use of this entitlement, all you have to do is ask. When opening a case (see previous topic), if a phone conversation is the best way to discuss the problem, let us know some dates/times you are available and we will schedule a call. Unless you tell us otherwise, we schedule the call using our own VoIP tool which allows for voice, video, and screen sharing.
Why can’t I just call a number to reach you?
Eventually you will be able to just call us anytime, but at this stage in our company’s size and scale we offer a scheduled call back service for phone support.
What about screen sharing?
Yes, we will be happy to take a look at anything that will help us resolve your question faster. The tool we use for phone conferences also allows you to share your screen with us. Just ask.
Making Use of the Community Forums
As discussed previously, the support we offer for Swiftype is specific to the Swiftype platform and not in-depth implementation support. Luckily we have vibrant and active communities around our products where you can get your more in-depth questions answered.
So, where are these communities?
Such a simple question, but a good one. The best place to start is www.elastic.co/community which lists all the best community resources. The most commonly used resources are our community forums on discuss.elastic.co.
Feel free to use these forums as sources of information and for general discussions. Of course, as a customer you do not need to rely on these communities for your critical or confidential support needs, and we strongly recommend against posting any time-sensitive requests here — you have us for that!