Service Levels
Service levels set the response expectations for supported systems, including how quickly we respond to outages, degraded service, and routine requests.
What Service Levels Mean
Service levels define how quickly we respond when something goes wrong.
Severity reflects the impact of an issue. A Severity 1 issue is a full outage. Lower severities cover degraded service, limited impact, or routine requests.
The comparison below shows response targets for each service level.
Service Level Comparison
Essentials
For development, staging, and non-live systems
Standard
For standard production systems
Enterprise
For critical production systems
Business hours and business days are defined on the Support Hours & Holidays page.
How Coverage Works
Essentials and Standard coverage apply during published business hours.
Enterprise service levels add 24×7 response availability for critical incidents. Severity 1 and Severity 2 issues receive a response at any time, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
Routine work such as maintenance, planned changes, and non-urgent requests is typically handled during normal business hours, with some work performed outside those hours when needed.
Severity Levels
Incidents are assigned a severity based on observed impact to live systems and business operations.
Higher-impact issues receive faster response and priority.
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| Severity 1 | The system is down or unavailable. This is a full outage that stops normal operation. Immediate response is required. |
| Severity 2 | The system is still running, but key functionality is significantly degraded. Users are impacted and core features may not work as expected. |
| Severity 3 | There is a partial issue or reduced performance, but the system is still usable. The impact is limited or affects non-critical functionality. |
| Severity 4 | Routine requests, minor issues, or planned work. No impact to normal system use. |
How to Choose the Right Service Level
The right service level depends on how important the system is, how quickly you need a response, and whether after-hours coverage is necessary.
Start with whether the system is live
Live systems are generally covered under Standard or Enterprise. Essentials is typically used for staging, development, and other non-live environments.
Decide whether business-hours response is enough
The main difference between Standard and Enterprise is after-hours response. If waiting until the next business-hours window would create a serious problem, Enterprise is usually the better fit.
Match the level to business impact
Customer-facing systems often justify Enterprise, but internal systems can as well when downtime would disrupt staff, delay work, or create meaningful business impact. Some teams also choose Standard for staging or development when faster response helps keep work moving.
In practice, the choice comes down to how long the business can comfortably wait for a response when a system has a problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Enterprise coverage is used for systems that require 24×7 response availability rather than business-hours-only support.
Yes, but service levels should align with how systems work together. Systems that are part of the same live workload or depend on each other are typically covered at the same service level.
For example, a live web tier and its database would both require Enterprise coverage if either depends on the other to remain available.
Separate or non-dependent systems can use different service levels. It is common to use Enterprise for live systems and Standard or Essentials for staging, development, or internal tools.
Response time is measured from when a ticket is opened or a monitoring alert is triggered to when an engineer acknowledges the issue and begins triage.
For Enterprise-covered systems, Severity 1 and Severity 2 response windows apply 24×7×365. For Standard and Essentials, response occurs during published business hours.
No. Enterprise coverage applies to incident response for Severity 1 and Severity 2 issues.
Maintenance, scheduled changes, and planned work are handled during normal business hours, with some work performed outside those hours as needed.
Enterprise coverage ensures engineers are available to respond when critical live-system issues occur outside standard hours.
If an issue is opened during off-hours and the system is not covered by Enterprise, it is handled during the next business-hours window.
If the issue escalates to Severity 1 or Severity 2, systems with Enterprise coverage can trigger a response at any time through the escalation path.