This Service Level Agreement defines the levels of service provided by Smoothwall and the obligations required of Smoothwall and the Customer/Partner.
Smoothwall provides remote support via telephone, live chat, and our customer portal.
Smoothwall will also provide Training on Smoothwall Products if required.
Where required, the Customer/Partner agrees to provide appropriate remote access facilities as a pre-condition for Smoothwall to be able to provide the agreed service level.
Smoothwall provides technical support for Smoothwall software and hardware solutions, non-Smoothwall IT Infrastructure is not covered under this agreement.
The Smoothwall Service Desk operates between the core hours of 08:30-17:00 Monday to Friday. If you have a 24/7 contract, support will be available to you outside of these core hours for P1 Incidents only.
The Customer/Partner is responsible for the management of their Smoothwall Solution. Smoothwall will provide technical support for faults under break-fix. Changes to the configuration of the solution are not covered under the support agreement. Additional charges may apply.
Configuration changes should be raised to your Account Manager and any work will be completed by our Projects Team.
Prior to logging a Support Ticket, it is expected that basic diagnostics and information gathering is carried out. Please consider checking our Knowledge Base before raising a Ticket with the Smoothwall Support Team. The Knowledge Base is available to all customers at https://kb.smoothwall.com.
The following information will be requested by the Service Desk when logging an Incident or Service Request:
Please note that all P1 Incidents must be submitted via telephone on 0800 5999 041/(800)-959-1261. Smoothwall is unable to guarantee a 1 Hour Response if P1s are not submitted via Telephone.
Support Tickets can be submitted via our Customer Portal at https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. The portal will also provide you with access to view open support tickets. If you require access to view all support tickets for your organization, please speak to your account manager.
Live Chat is also available on our Knowledge Base page for any quick queries.
Smoothwall will aim to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible to minimize impact on business operations.
If the Incident has been resolved (i.e., a workaround has been applied), the Support Ticket will be closed and an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) Ticket will be created to ascertain the root cause. Once the root cause is determined, additional work may take place for preventative maintenance.
A workaround is defined as an agreed tactical (potentially partial) solution succeeding in returning the Customer/Partner system to acceptable service for a short term pending a full resolution or RCA.
| Priority | Classification | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| P1 / Urgent | Critical Incident |
Smoothwall Services are completely unusable OR web filtering services are unavailable. (1 school or more, 1 x LA or entire platform outage)
|
| P2 / High | Major Incident | Service degraded. Services suffering major disruption.
|
| P3 / Normal | Minor Incident | Minor disruption to the system – e.g., Standard Web Filtering issues. |
| P4 / Service Request | Service Request (No SLA) | Service Requests are not covered under the Service Agreement. Smoothwall Support will provide best endeavours advice and guidance for Service Requests. See examples below:
|
| Priority | Initial Response | Target Restoration | Applicable Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 – Urgent | <60 mins | <1 Business Day | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
| P2 – High | <2 Business Hours | <2 Business Days | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
| P3 – Normal | <4 Business Hours | <5 Business Days | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
| P4 – Service Request | N/A | N/A | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
| Root Cause Analysis | N/A | N/A | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
| Problem Ticket | N/A | N/A | M-F 8:30 to 17:00 |
Service Requests are not covered under the Service Level Agreement. Smoothwall Support will provide best endeavours advice and guidance between the hours of 08.30 – 17.00 Monday to Friday.
Service Requests are either a request for information at the request of the customer, a new request or a change to the configuration of the Smoothwall service, a request for help on how to run a report, or troubleshooting a minor issue. (Please note that our Knowledge Base contains a wide range of detailed articles to allow customers to make changes to their Smoothwall solution)
Please note that the Customer/Partner is responsible for the overall management of the Smoothwall Solution.
Incidents are escalated into the Major Incident Management Process after triage, thus ensuring their validity and for them to be managed based on their likely risk and impact.
Major Incidents will comprise of multiple sites affected (depending on impact). Smoothwall will engage through this process to ensure appropriate responses and communications are maintained.
Smoothwall will engage as necessary and appropriate to provide timely support, advice, and assistance.
Major Incidents may result in a Root Cause Analysis Ticket to identify the Root Cause.
In some cases, a Root Cause Analysis may be required. Please note it is at the sole discretion of Smoothwall as to whether a Root Cause Analysis will be provided.
Root Cause Analysis Reports will include:
Problem Management is the process by which Problem Tickets are raised to our Development Team to be investigated as the cause of, or potential cause of multiple customer incidents.
This would typically be a product defect or bug that causes a degraded service for one or more customers that may require further development of the product to provide a permanent solution.
A Problem Ticket will be raised in the event that one or more of the following criteria are met:
Customer Incidents will be investigated by the Senior 3rd Line Team within the Smoothwall Support Department initially to ascertain whether further Development work is required, or if another solution can be applied. The Customer is also required to provide reasonable assistance and access to enable diagnostics to further the investigation.
Once a Problem Ticket has been raised and assigned to the Smoothwall Development Team, all Incidents linked to that Problem will no longer carry an SLA Target as this sits outside the scope of the Support Agreement.
Smoothwall will aim to provide weekly updates on the progress of Problem Tickets. Once a root cause is identified the Customer will be notified and further information will follow via the Support Ticket.
The Problem Ticket will be closed once follow-up actions are completed and agreed upon by the customer.
Smoothwall Support is available for Urgent/P1 Incidents only 24x7x365 for Premium and Enhanced Service Agreement. All P1s must be submitted via Telephone. Please note that the out-of-hours service is a limited service, therefore SLAs will only be adhered to within core hours.
Any planned work should be raised to your Customer Success Manager as this could incur further charges.
The Smoothwall Service Desk operates between the core hours of 08:30-17:00 Monday to Friday for all other support matters.
Online Training and Accreditation is available to Customers/Partners. Please contact your Customer Success Manager for access to our Customer Training Platform.
If you require additional Training/Consultancy, this may be chargeable.
Smoothwall will provide a Hardware Limited Warranty / RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) for Hardware Failures.
Return Merchandise Authorization is defined as Smoothwall’s process for handling Hardware limited warranty claims or hardware replacements following a hardware fault.
Smoothwall will provide support, advice, and guidance regarding Smoothwall Software Products. This will include Blocklist updates (Filter Customers Only) Bug Fixes and updates via the Release Management schedule.
Incident diagnosis and resolution may require the active participation of Customer/Partner staff to provide information and assistance and carry out requested tasks in a timely manner.
The Customer / Partner agrees to use all reasonable endeavours to execute Smoothwall’s requests and provide information in a timely fashion. Smoothwall’s ‘response’ and ‘fix’ service levels calculations will omit the Customer/Partner time taken to complete delegated actions and requests.
It is recommended practice that the Customer/Partner executes and tests regular backups of Smoothwall configurations. It is therefore the Customer/Partner’s responsibility to take regular backups of the appliance configurations. Failure to do so may result in delays in resolving incidents beyond Smoothwall’s reasonable control.
Smoothwall generates Blocklist updates daily at approximately 3:15 am (GMT). The Customer / Partner agrees to allow the Smoothwall software to operate normally to complete automatic updates of Blocklists, usually by 4:30 am (GMT) daily on their systems(s) in order that Smoothwall software can provide optimum, up-to-date internet security protection. At its sole discretion, Smoothwall may, from time to time, generate Blocklist updates at times other than 3:15 am (GMT) in order to mitigate risks and/or issues bearing the potential to affect Customer / Partner service. The Customer / Partner accepts the need for daily and periodic automatic updates required by Smoothwall software to operate optimally.
In the event that the original priority changes due to a degrading of service, please call the Service Desk to report any changes to the incident. The incident will then be escalated appropriately to the relevant priority level.
Upon reaching an agreed resolution with the Customer/Partner, the incident will be closed, and the relevant ticket number updated accordingly on Smoothwall’s system. In the event that the Customer / Partner’s Authorized Contact(s) do not respond to telephone calls, voicemail messages or emails for 5 working days to verify their agreement to the incident being resolved, Smoothwall reserves the right to close the incident and relevant ticket number. In the event that the original incident re-occurs, Smoothwall agrees to re-open the incident and continue the investigation.
Smoothwall Hardware limited warranty terms, where relevant, apply within the Agreement. See; https://qoria.com/legal
Smoothwall Engineers may need to remotely access Customer / Partner Smoothwall systems in order to investigate faults. It is Smoothwall’s recommendation that the Customer/Partner provides remote access utilizing a secure encrypted connection (eg. VPN, SSH, HTTPS or using the TeamViewer remote access software provided by Smoothwall). Smoothwall would be pleased to discuss this requirement further with the Customer/Partner if required and may, subject to agreed charges, provide design and installation for the above. When remotely accessing Customer/Partner sites Smoothwall staff will rely upon the Customer/Partner for their guidance on local system security and system access permission issues. Delays due to Customers in obtaining suitable access to Customer/Partner Smoothwall systems will be excluded from SLA performance calculations.
For the purposes of service levels, an incident will be considered as ‘resolved’ (and thus the ticket will be closed) when Smoothwall has provided the Customer/Partner with an agreed solution or temporary workaround providing a ‘return to service’ for the Customer / Partner system. Smoothwall will take all reasonable steps to ensure that the solution (or proposed solution or workaround) will resolve (or at least mitigate) the issue being experienced by the Customer. Smoothwall will make all reasonable endeavours to contact the Customer/Partner in order to verify that the incident is satisfactorily resolved. In the event that Smoothwall cannot contact the Customer/Partner or the Customer/Partner does not respond within five working days of the first contact attempt, Smoothwall reserves the right to close the relevant ticket.
Should the Customer/Partner later inform Smoothwall that the solution has not been effective then the relevant ticket will be re-opened and Smoothwall will re-commence work on providing an effective resolution. In the case of a work-around then the incident priority level will be reassessed appropriately for the changed circumstances and service level achievement calculations suitably amended. Please note Support Tickets cannot be reopened after a 2-week period.
The Customer/Partner will take all reasonable measures to ensure that all Smoothwall products or services are maintained fully up-to-date with the latest software updates.
The Customer/Partner can submit a ticket to Smoothwall when a new update is available. Smoothwall will provide necessary guidance to facilitate the upgrade/update process if required. (Please note this would be considered a Service Request).
Smoothwall will not be bound by the terms of this Agreement in any of the following circumstances:
The Support Services do not cover the following:
The term of this Agreement is defined by the years purchased by the Customer / Partner through a formal Purchase Order. Smoothwall will register the Purchase Order, Agreement and term on our systems.