Support terms and service level agreements (SLA) for OutSystems 11 FedRAMP

OutSystems Support Terms of Use

OutSystems Support covers the OutSystems platform and related web services, such as management portals and web APIs, that support the service or software delivered to our customers.

All references to “the OutSystems platform” refer to OutSystems’ Software product OutSystems 11 FedRAMP.

Contacting OutSystems Support

All customers with a valid and active Subscription can contact OutSystems Support to submit or update Support Tickets. OutSystems FedRAMP Support is provided by US support personnel.

Types of Support Tickets

Support tickets are classified into one of three types of tickets. Each type is handled differently:

• Request. We have a set of Service changes which may be available depending on a customer’s product configuration, which can be requested by customers.
• Incident. Use an Incident ticket if you are experiencing an issue with the OutSystems platform. Refer to the Support Severity Levels & Response Times below to understand how OutSystems deals with Incident tickets.
• Question. Use a Question ticket if you have questions on the expected behavior of the OutSystems platform or on a specific service you wish to activate for your subscription. Questions are treated as Low severity.

Contact Channels

You can contact OutSystems Support using one of the channels below:

Depending on the channel you choose, you can contact OutSystems Support in the periods specified below:

Technical Contacts

Only technical contacts named and approved by your company can submit Support Tickets and interact with Support. All technical contacts must be registered in the US-GOV-SUPPORT PORTAL prior to opening or interacting with any Support Ticket.  Your company can add unlimited technical contacts to the company account. 

We strongly recommend setting your technical contacts immediately after acquiring an OutSystems subscription. This prevents delays in sensitive situations, allows for the correct distribution of responsibilities across your organization and creates redundancy (in case people leave your company or switch roles internally).

Technical contacts are expected to be knowledgeable with OutSystems and specifics related to software installations and Support. Having knowledgeable technical contacts makes interactions with OutSystems Support faster and more efficient for both your company and OutSystems, accelerating ticket resolution. Online self-training is available to onboard your technical contacts into OutSystems.

In some cases, OutSystems will open a ticket on behalf of a customer.

Language

You can communicate with OutSystems Support in English.

Service Availability

OutSystems defines service Uptime as the availability of the production application runtime environments or stages.

Monthly Uptime Percentage is calculated as 100% minus the percentage of Downtime minutes out of the total minutes during that calendar month. Downtime minutes are counted as the number of minutes the Application runtime is not accessible to end users during the Support Access Periods the customer is entitled to. Where the Customer has more than one production runtime environment (used throughout these Support terms for OutSystems 11), Uptime is calculated as the average of the availability of all such runtimes.

Service Remedy: Upon Customer’s timely notice to OutSystems in accordance with the Service Credits Claims process set forth below, if the availability of the OutSystems platform (measured separately for each Software product licensed by Customer when multiple Software products are licensed) for the month falls below the applicable Monthly Uptime Percentage commitment (Service Uptime exclusions apply), then OutSystems will credit to Customer for the next subscription renewal a portion of the subscription fees (measured separately for each Software product licensed by Customer when multiple Software products are licensed), prorated for the month where such failure occurred, as follows (each a “Service Credit”).

Service Credit Claims: In order to be eligible to receive a Service Credit, Customer must request such Service Credit from OutSystems no later than thirty (30) days following the end of any month in which Customer believes that the uptime commitment was not met. Service Credits not requested within such thirty (30) day period will be automatically forfeited. Service Credits shall be Customer's sole remedy for OutSystems failure to meet the uptime commitment. Service Credits shall not be redeemable for cash.

OutSystems may provide, through its published product documentation or through Support, Customer Success, or other services, guidelines to help achieve optimal performance, scalability, and maintainability of the Customer’s applications. The Customer acknowledges that its adherence to such guidelines is an important factor in OutSystems’ ability to deliver optimal performance and that its failure to adhere to such guidelines may impact OutSystems’ ability to provide the Support services and to meet its Service Level Agreements.

RPO and RTO

OutSystems’ processes mitigate the risks associated with the failure of a single availability zone and is based on 3 key concepts:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum possible interval of time before a disaster to which you may need to roll back your system. All data changes from the moment of the disaster backward until RPO time are assumed to be lost in the event of a disaster.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO)  is the maximum possible interval of time between the moment of a disaster and the moment where the system is back up and fully functioning in the status defined by your RPO. The system is assumed to be down from the moment of the disaster until RTO time after the disaster.
• Disaster is a disruption to the service from which the system design is prepared to recover. Disruptions from which the system is not prepared to recover are considered force majeure, and the consequence of such disruption is not foreseen in the business recovery strategy. The OutSystems platform system design is not prepared to recover from a failure of multiple availability zones and therefore such events are considered force majeure.

General Assurance

The Service is hosted using infrastructure provided by Knox ("Underlying Provider"), which maintains FedRAMP Moderate Authorization and relevant Authority to Operate (ATO). Recovery Time Objective ("RTO") and Recovery Point Objective ("RPO") for the Service are set and maintained by the Underlying Provider consistent with its FedRAMP System Security Plan (SSP) and are subject to change as directed by the FedRAMP PMO or the Underlying Provider's authorizing agency.

Service Uptime Exclusions

For customers with a valid and not discontinued subscription of the OutSystems platform, OutSystems shall use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure the applicable service uptime for OutSystems 11 Cloud in accordance to their edition, in any given month of the Subscription Term, excluding the periods:

(i) in which either OutSystems or the Customer are performing Planned Maintenance;
(ii) that result from termination as described in the Agreement;
(iii) that result from suspension due to overdue payments;
(iv) caused by factors outside of OutSystems’ reasonable control, including any Force Majeure event, Internet access or related issues;
(v) that result from any actions or inactions of the Customer or any third party on behalf of the Customer;
(vi) that result from Customer’s equipment, software or other technology and/or third-party equipment, software or other technology, contracted by the Customer;
(vii) caused by Customer’s use of the Software in a manner inconsistent with the documentation or OutSystems’ guidance;
(viii) caused by the Customer’s use of the Software after OutSystems advised the customer to modify its use of the Software;
(ix) caused by the Customer’s use of the Software in a manner that exceeds the entitled scalability of instances;
(x) attributable to acts by persons gaining unauthorized access to or use of the Software due to Customer’s failure to maintain and control security and access to the Software;
(xi) attributable to the acts or omissions of the Customer or its employees,agents, contractors, or vendors, or anyone gaining access to the Software and/or the Support and Updates services by means of Customer’s credentials or equipment;
(xii) that result from the deployment or execution of Applications which, due to excessively complex or erroneous programming of said Applications, will not consistently answer user requests successfully, with a predictable term, without errors or any sort, and without behaviors susceptible of consuming excessive resources from the underlying hardware or software, or causing contention in access to said resources.

Force Majeure

Force Majeure are unforeseeable circumstances that may prevent OutSystems from complying with its obligations concerning Service Availability. Although force majeure events fall outside OutSystems’ control, OutSystems will use all reasonable commercial efforts to recover the service for its customers.

Force majeure events are defined for each customer in its Master Subscription Agreement.

Planned Maintenance

From time to time, OutSystems will perform maintenance. These maintenance tasks update the OutSystems Software for FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud and the underlying hardware and infrastructure to ensure you benefit from new capabilities and improvements. These updates will be classified as maintenance and will be planned to the extent possible in accordance with these Support Terms wherever possible. This maintenance process delivers security and service improvements to provide increased stability, reliability, and performance.

These changes can include:

• Hardware or infrastructure updates
• Service changes and software updates
• Database Version upgrades
• Vulnerability patches
• Key and certificate rotation
• OS Updates and Patching

Where planned maintenance events may disrupt the availability of runtime applications:

• OutSystems will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify Customers with at least 3 business days in advance.
• OutSystems will notify all technical contacts associated with the company via email.

Maintenance Windows

A maintenance window is a period of time designated in advance, during which planned maintenance tasks are performed. All planned maintenance will occur in this maintenance window. There will be times when maintenance occurs outside of these windows in order to maintain system availability, performance, and security of the OutSystems Platform.

OutSystems 11 Cloud Maintenance Windows

OutSystems sets the maintenance window for OutSystems 11 Cloud environments when they are created. However, customers can configure the maintenance of their Cloud environments for a more suitable time window. Some operations will cause downtime during the selected time period. In this case, the administrator(s) will be informed before the operation is performed.

Security Vulnerability Maintenance

For FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud, for Planned Maintenance relating to security vulnerabilities, OutSystems reserves the right to temporarily suspend customer applications which OutSystems determines are at significant risk of a security incident due to customer’s failure to install Software Updates provided by OutSystems which remedy a critical or high security vulnerability, as determined by OutSystems in its reasonable discretion, until such time as customer has installed the Software Updates required by OutSystems to remedy the applicable vulnerability. The time period of such suspension will be considered a Service Uptime Exclusion.

Maintenance for security vulnerabilities may cause temporary downtime of applications.

Scalability of Instances

OutSystems reserves the right to, in its sole discretion, scale up and scale down all FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud instances, both horizontally and vertically, to efficiently support the deployment of licensed OutSystems Software and customer applications. Such scaling may be limited based on a customer’s licensed entitlements. In addition, additional scaling at the request of a customer may be available for a fee.

There is a list of service changes available upon request for FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud customers.

Support Severity Levels & Response Times

OutSystems Support works with Severity Levels based on the impact of a given issue to the business of the customer. Severity levels of Support Tickets are chosen by the customers upon opening of the ticket and should reflect the business impact of the issue, according to the definition below. OutSystems Support reserves the right to adjust the severity selected by customers as the support progresses.

Severity Levels

The table below describes each of the severity levels available for Incident tickets and the environment for which the ticket can be open under that severity:

First Response and Subsequent Responses

First response means that OutSystems Support has analyzed the incident you reported, has performed initial analysis of your incident and will contact you with an indication of a remediation action for your incident, a request for additional information to better understand your incident or another relevant technical update to the case.

OutSystems Support will provide the first response to your Support Ticket according to the table below:

After the first response, OutSystems Support will work on each ticket according to its current severity towards resolution. Depending on the Customer’s support level, OutSystems will, whenever possible, endeavor to provide the following:

⁽¹⁾ Or as agreed between OutSystems and the customer on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
⁽²⁾ Or as relevant progress occurs.

Support Access Periods

Support access periods depend on the level of support acquired by the customer and on the registered location of the customer:

• 24x7: customers are entitled to support at any moment of any day.

Customers have access to 8x5 or 24x7 support according to the table below:

• OutSystems Business Days are Monday through Friday, except January 1 and December 25, for our customers worldwide. Customers in the Middle-East region have Business Days Sunday through Thursday (if their country works in Sun-Thu weeks).
• OutSystems Business Hours depend on customer's location:
  
  • 5 AM to 5 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time) for customers headquartered in North, Central, and South America;

Solving Support Tickets

OutSystems Support follows an ITIL-like approach to solving Support Tickets, focused on customer value first. This means that we will focus on restoring service/value to the business, without forgetting the need to contribute to the continuous improvement of the service we deliver to customers.

After you open a Support Ticket, a support engineer will work with you to identify and resolve your issue. The resolution provided by OutSystems may include one or more of the following:

• A Fix of the OutSystems Software;
• A mutually agreed workaround that mitigates the situation, even if further investigation may be needed to reach the root cause of the situation (e.g., under the Problem Management motion);
• Another remedy, such as a reconfiguration of the Software.

We consider Support Tickets resolved if any of the following occurs:

• Your issue is fixed or an appropriate workaround has been identified. Further investigation may be needed under the RCA motion;
• The source of the issue lies with third-party software or hardware components. In this case, OutSystems will continue to help as deemed appropriate by OutSystems Support management as you work with the third party on resolution;
• You do not respond to a query or request from us for more than 12 business days;
• You choose not to pursue troubleshooting of the issue;
• It is not possible to obtain the elements needed for troubleshooting using reasonable effort.

For issues that reoccur you may open a new Support Ticket that refers to the previous one.

As a rule, OutSystems provides Support and Updates from its offices only. Remote assistance with internet-based conferencing tools is available and will be used only when deemed necessary by the support engineer and such use is requested by the Customer.

OutSystems Support works on support tickets according to their severity as follows:

• Urgent and High severity cases are worked during the periods in which the customer is entitled to Support (24x7). For these cases, telephone / synchronous communication can be expected during those periods.
• Normal and Low severity cases are worked Monday-Friday (except Jan 1 and Dec 25). For these cases, electronic/asynchronous communication can be expected.

When resolving a support ticket, the priority for OutSystems Support is removing the impact that an incident is having on customer activities. For that reason, OutSystems Support works with the Customer in order to resolve an incident prioritizing workarounds or remedies such as reconfiguration of the Software. Production of fixes to OutSystems Software outside of a Monday-Friday period will only happen in association to an Urgent or High case, if no workaround or remedy such as reconfiguration of the Software is available, and if the End Customer is entitled to 24x7 support OutSystems Business Hours.

Help Us Help You

To speed up the troubleshooting of your incidents, be sure to include the below information in your communications:

• End Customer Name: the owner of OutSystems Platform with the incident;
• Activation Code: the infrastructure unique identifier. Learn how to find the Activation Code for your infrastructure;
• The version of the OutSystems Platform;
• The incident you are experiencing, and steps to reproduce the incident. Learn how to troubleshoot frequent incidents;
• What you think is the severity level of your incident, and why.

When you use US-GOV-SUPPORT PORTAL to open your support cases most of the information above is automatically filled in. Even when submitting Urgent tickets, you should open it initially via US-GOV-SUPPORT PORTAL and then phone Support for expedited assistance.

Be sure to accurately explain the situation you are experiencing so that our support engineers can help you solve your incident quickly. Also, make sure you are available in case our support engineers need your assistance for further troubleshooting.

Support Level Availability

Each edition of OutSystems comes with an included Support level:

Escalating Support Tickets

OutSystems has an implemented Escalation Management practice that ensures we resolve tickets maximizing value for our customers. You can escalate a ticket when you feel that either:

• Your ticket has become more severe or should have a higher severity level; or
• We are not resolving your support case appropriately; or
•  Response Times are not being adhered to First Response and Subsequent Responses.

Before you request escalation, make sure that you have opened a Support Ticket. The information on the ticket must enable us to understand:

• The severity of the issue for your business.
• Why OutSystems must work on the issue with higher urgency.

When you escalate a ticket, the support team is trained to trigger internal escalation within the management of OutSystems Support, following our practice.

Scope of OutSystems Support

OutSystems Support covers development and production issues for OutSystems platform deployments, covering for you in situations such as:

a. Troubleshooting issues with the OutSystems development tools (Service Studio, Integration Studio, etc) and the publish processes;
b. Troubleshooting well-defined situations where runtime primitives, built-in integration methods, supported forge components or public API do not behave as documented;
c. Issues with our consoles (such as Service Center and LifeTime) and the use-cases supported by them (e.g. staging, performance monitoring);
d. Troubleshooting operational or systemic incidents with FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud;
e. Incidents detected by OutSystems monitoring systems for FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud.

OutSystems Support does not include:

f. Developing applications for you, or answering questions on your application architecture or on recommended development patterns best practices;
g. Debugging your applications;
h. Analyzing and troubleshooting the performance of your applications or your infrastructure;
i. Analyzing and troubleshooting customizations made to Supported components obtained from the OutSystems forge;
j. Analyzing and troubleshooting behaviors in non-Supported community-developed components obtained from the OutSystems forge;
k. Performing system administration tasks (including network tasks and troubleshooting networking issues) on self-managed installations;
l. Performing system administration tasks on Cloud installations outside of the service catalog;
m. Answering questions about the roadmap and future features of the OutSystems platform. Customers are free to suggest new features through our Ideas page at outsystems.com/ideas.

Additionally, OutSystems shall have no obligation to support:

n. Software installed on any hardware and/or interfaces that are not supported by OutSystems;
o. Incidents caused by Customer’s negligence, abuse or misapplication or use of the OutSystems platform other than as specified in the Documentation; in the applicable agreement(s) and Order(s); or other causes beyond the control of OutSystems

OutSystems documents the correct usage and expected behavior of the platform in its public documentation.

Software Updates

Types of Updates. OutSystems provides three types of Software Updates:

• Patches are maintenance updates that fix defects and vulnerabilities;
• Releases are incremental updates to an existing major version that introduce minor new features or improve existing features in incremental ways; and
• Major Releases are evolutionary updates that introduce significant improvements and changes.

Both releases and major releases may contain changes that break existing customer applications.

Rights to Updates. Software Updates are available to customers with a valid and active Subscription. Patches and new Releases are available for customers which have applications running on the most recent Release, unless otherwise agreed by OutSystems. For customers which have applications running on older Releases or Major Releases, technical assistance with troubleshooting is available through Support to assist those customers in migrating their applications to the most recent Release and Major Release.

Learn more about Software updates on the Product Lifecycle information page.

Installation of Updates. OutSystems takes care of installing Updates in all environments for customers running on FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud. Customers only have to update their applications. For FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud, OutSystems will schedule the timing of each Update with each Cloud customer. When a version of the OutSystems Software reaches the end of mainstream support, OutSystems will schedule mandatory upgrades of FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud, as applicable, to a supported version.

Updates for Security Vulnerabilities. For Updates needed to fix Critical and High security vulnerabilities (determined in accordance with OutSystems Public Vulnerability Policy), this update will be installed by OutSystems on the date scheduled with the customer. In urgent cases,  OutSystems reserves the right to perform Emergency Maintenance - defined as any period of time in which your environment is modified for the purposes of stabilizing or securing the system in response to immediate threats. OutSystems will make all reasonable attempts to notify the customer in advance prior to Emergency Maintenance windows. However, to ensure platform stability and security, OutSystems reserves the right to install these critical security updates on a predetermined date within Planned Maintenance windows, with or without customer confirmation. 

You should plan your update carefully to have a minimal business impact. When a Software Update impacts existing applications, OutSystems will provide a technical note with update strategies. See Upgrade OutSystems Platform for details.

End of Support for Older Software Versions

OutSystems is committed to supporting the OutSystems 11 platform for as long as there is continued and viable demand for support from our customers. If OutSystems determines that it is no longer able to provide full support for either platform, for example due to disruptions in the technical stack for the platform, OutSystems will provide notice to affected customers at least five years in advance. Customers with a valid Subscription are entitled to full Support and Updates as described in these Support terms for the platforms covered by its Subscription unless and until full support is discontinued by OutSystems following this five year notice period.

Customers can consult the Product Lifecycle information page to understand the timelines for support of the platform covered by their Subscription.

When full support ends for a particular platform, OutSystems is no longer able to release Updates to such platform. Customers with a valid Subscription are still entitled to open Support Tickets for the platform that reached the end of mainstream support, but:

• OutSystems cannot guarantee a response within the defined SLA;
• Ticket resolutions will only include advice or workarounds (when available);
• When a fix is needed to resolve a ticket, OutSystems will only provide such fix in an Update for a currently supported version. In this situation, the customer will have to upgrade their platform to a version under mainstream support;
• The Availability SLA for the FedRAMP OutSystems 11 Cloud is not guaranteed.

Licensing and Commercial Inquiries

Licensing and Commercial Inquiries

• Explore the Licensing area of the Support knowledge base;
• Contact your sales representative or account manager.

If you don’t have an account manager or don’t know the contacts of your sales representative, please use the contact form at outsystems.com/contacts/.