Hosting Service Manual

Platform Support

Day to day support is managed by technicians on our support desk, overseen by the Service Desk Manager.

Hours

08:00 - 18:00, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays in England

Support Channels

We use Jira for ongoing support management. See Raising Support Tickets in Jira for more information about raising support tickets. Our support team receive immediate alerts for all new support tickets raised which are quickly triaged for impact and urgency. 

You can also access support by emailing ticket@support.gossinteractive.com; or for more general advice and guidance our Slack Community can be a useful place to ask.

For critical incidents during support hours, you can contact the support team on 0844 880 3637.

Support Service Levels and Priorities

Issue resolution will be in line with the targets below. Severity levels are assigned by the support desk.

Priority 1 - Critical

Extremely urgent issues, for example complete loss of system or something that prevents users from effectively using a significant element of the system.

Priority 2 - Major

Issues that materially affect usage or a majority of users from using the system effectively.

Priority 3 - Minor

Anything which affects part of the system but does not materially affect its operation and allows users to continue using the system. Low priority reported issues may, at the GOSS' sole discretion, be categorised as non-support matters and addressed during appropriate product backlog development.

Service Exclusions

The following services may incur additional charges:

• Out-of-hours upgrade, patch and update management
• Out-of-hours deployment management
• Assistance to investigate or resolve non fault-related issues
• Consultancy
• Training
• Investigation of issues not attributable to GOSS, for example, misuse of the software/service, issues caused 3rd party systems not managed by GOSS, etc

Please note that support is provided to, and support tickets can only be raised by, users who have received training on the GOSS Platform and products. Questions and advice around implementation and configuration are out of scope of our support contracts.

Non-Production Environments

Support service levels and priorities cover production environments. Non-live environments, for example development and test environments, are not covered by our SLAs. Any issues in these environments should be addressed as part of ongoing work.

Hosting Out of Hours Support

All production and DR environments are provided with 24/7/365 third line support by our network engineers. Pre-production, test and development environments are managed and maintained during GOSS business hours.

When you host with us we will provide you with out of hours contact details.

Releases and Deployments

Direct access to production, pre-production and DR servers is restricted to members of the GOSS hosting team. Deployments to these environments are performed via automated processes and/or release management tools.

Release Management

We use release management tools to control artifact releases into a hosted repository, which includes versioned releases of our products and web applications.

Applications are deployed using continuous integration mechanisms. Releases to pre-production and production environments are carried out in a phased and controlled manner via sequenced build pipelines. Our build pipelines are also responsible for applying the correct configuration for each environment, which is stored separately from released artifacts using an encrypted secrets management tool.

Releases that include "content", for example forms or workflow models created via the CMS, follow the same structured rollout through environments.

GOSS Project and Support Releases

These deployments are scheduled by either a GOSS project manager or support technician. Approval is required from you via the change control process before a deployment can be made.

Deployment schedules and frequency vary according to your service plan.

Client Code

We may allow your own developers access to the web application and repositories to carry out your own development work. Where such access is granted, your developers will have the ability to push snapshot builds to your development environment, and submit merge requests. Deployments beyond your development environment are subject to our standard change control process.

We reserve the right to charge for any time required to fix and resolve problems caused by deployments of your code.

GOSS Standard Change Control Process

The change control process covers any work that requires a code deployment or change to your development, test, pre-production, production and DR environments.

Project Work and Support Fixes

Changes are managed by a GOSS project manager or support technician as appropriate. Change control documents are completed by the relevant GOSS developer and will detail:

• The changes being deployed
• The reason for the changes and appropriate references
• The deployment process
• The testing process once the change has been made
• The rollback process should the change not work as expected
• The risk of the change being deployed

Once approved a date will be scheduled for the changes to be made. Changes are deployed between 09:00 and 15:30, Monday to Friday, for pre-production and DR environments, and between 09:00 and 15:30 Monday to Thursday for production environments.

General Planned Maintenance

Planned maintenance change controls include:

• The date and time of the planned work
• Any potential downtime
• Any content freeze requirements
• The changes being deployed
• The reason for the changes
• The deployment process
• The testing process once the change has been made
• The rollback process should the change not work as expected
• The risk of the change being deployed

Where possible, we provide at least seven days' notice for any planned maintenance and, if there is a risk of an outage, will try to schedule the work outside of business hours to minimise impact.

Client Specific Maintenance

Maintenance tasks specific to a single client environment are managed in the same way as platform support fixes.

Emergency Work

Emergency and urgent maintenance work can be carried out without notice, at such times as we feel reasonable.

If emergency work or maintenance is to take place during normal support hours prior notice will be given by telephone or email.

If emergency work or maintenance is to take place outside of these hours notification will be given via telephone or email on the next working day.

Client-Hosted Servers

We are not responsible for the maintenance or management of any non-hosted servers. Support for your own development and test servers is excluded from the GOSS Digital Platform Support and Maintenance contract. Any requests for support, upgrades, patches and update deployments will be chargeable.

Complaints and Escalations

Please see www.gossinteractive.com/complaints (opens new window) for our complaints and escalation policy.