Amazon Web Services Support Features

We're ready to help you, no matter what hours you keep. Our Developer-level tier offers support via email Monday through Friday 9 a.m.–6 p.m. in China time. Customers subscribed to Business Support, Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support have access to support at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days per year via phone, chat, and email.

Our Amazon Web Services Technical Support tiers cover development and production issues for Amazon Web Services products and services, along with other key stack components:

• "How to" questions about Amazon Web Services services and features
• Best practices to help you successfully integrate, deploy, and manage applications in the cloud
• Troubleshooting API and Amazon SDK issues
• Troubleshooting operational or systemic problems with Amazon Web Services resources
• Issues with our Management Console or other Amazon Web Services tools
• Problems detected by EC2 health checks
• A number of third-party applications such as OS, web servers, email, VPN, databases, and storage configuration
• Amazon Web Services Support does not include:
• Code development
• Debugging custom software
• Performing system administration tasks
• Database query tuning

From the Support Center, all Amazon Web Services Support customers on an enhanced service tier can:

• Open a case online with Support via email (web support), chat, or phone
• Send us more information by adding additional correspondences to your existing case
• Check on the status of your open cases
• Track any telephone or online correspondence between you and our developer support engineers
• View the Service Health Dashboard for each Amazon Web Services region
• Jump to other handy resources like the Discussion Forums and the Product FAQs
  

From the Support Center, all Developer-level and higher Support customers can open a case online. Customers subscribed to Business Support, Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support can ask Amazon Web Services to call at any convenient phone number or strike up a conversation with one of our engineers via chat. Enterprise-level customers also have direct access to their dedicated Technical Account Manager.

Support for Health Checks

Health Checks monitor the health and status of Amazon Web Services services, and the status of these checks is displayed in the Amazon Web Services Management Console. When a check does not pass, customers have the option to open a high-priority ticket with Technical Support for assistance. Health Checks are currently available for Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes.

Our goal is to provide an appropriate level of urgency to each case based on the impact to your business or application. Opening cases with the appropriate level of severity will help us get you in touch with the right Support professionals within the target response times.

Critical: Your business is at risk. Critical functions of your application are unavailable.
Urgent: Your business is significantly impacted. Important functions of your application are unavailable.
High: Important functions of your application are impaired or degraded.
Normal: Non-critical functions of your application are behaving abnormally, or you have a time-sensitive development question.
Low: You have a general development question, or you want to request a feature.

Our target response time will vary based on the impact you tell us the issue is having on your business. We will make every reasonable effort to respond to your initial request within the timeframes in the table below.

We provide best practice recommendations to improve performance and efficiency. We make recommendations on how new Amazon Web Services offerings may fit your use case.

Business Support, Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support include support for common operating systems and common application stack components. Amazon Web Services Support engineers can assist with the setup, configuration, and troubleshooting of the following third-party platforms and applications.

Operating systems on EC2 instances:

• Ubuntu Server
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora
• SUSE Linux (SLES and openSUSE)
• CentOS Linux
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

Infrastructure components: Sendmail and Postfix MTAs

• OpenVPN and RRAS
• SSH, SFTP, and FTP
• LVM and Software RAID

Web servers:

• Apache
• IIS
• Nginx

Databases:

• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server

Additional Details:

• Third-party software support is available only to Amazon Web Services Support customers subscribed to Business Support, Enterprise On-Ramp or Enterprise Support.
  
• Amazon Web Services Support does not provide hands-on systems administration. Our advice is intended for experienced systems administrators and IT staff.
• Amazon Web Services Support does not provide support for third-party software not listed here.
• Support in non-English languages is provided best effort.
• Third-party support applies only to software running on Amazon EC2 and does not extend to assisting with on-premises software, with the exception of VPN tunnel configuration for supported devices for Amazon VPC.
• Amazon Web Services Support response times (e.g. <15 min) are for the first response and are not resolution times for third-party software cases.
  

• Amazon Trusted Advisor draws upon best practices learned from the aggregated operational history of serving hundreds of thousands of Amazon Web Services customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your Amazon Web Services environment and alerts you to opportunities to save money, improve system availability and performance, or help close security gaps. For more information, see Amazon Trusted Advisor.
  

Amazon Web Services Infrastructure Event Management is a short-term engagement with Amazon Web Services Support, included with Enterprise Support, included one-per-year with Enterprise On-Ramp, and available for additional fee for Business Support customers. Amazon Web Services Infrastructure Event Management partners with your technical and project resources to gain a deep understanding of your use case and provide architectural and scaling guidance for an event. Common use-case examples for Amazon Web Services Event Management include advertising launches, new product launches, and infrastructure migrations to Amazon Web Services.

Your Amazon Web Services Concierge is a senior customer service agent who is assigned to your account when you subscribe to an Enterprise or qualified Reseller Support plan. This Concierge agent is your primary point of contact for billing or account inquiries; when you don’t know whom to call, they will find the right people to help. In most cases, the Amazon Web Services Concierge is available during regular business hours in your headquarters’ geography. The best way to contact the Amazon Web Services Concierge is through the  Amazon Web Services Support Center.

Here are some of the questions that you might ask your Amazon Web Services Concierge:

• How is my monthly bill calculated?
• How can I optimize costs?
• How can I restructure my consolidated bill?
• How can I locate the service limits for my accounts?
• How can I identify underutilized resources?
• How can I manage multiple linked accounts on a consolidated bill?
• How can I make a bulk Reserved Instances purchase?
• My company has merged with another company. How do I transition the Amazon Web Services accounts to the new company?

The Amazon Web Services Support API allows you to programmatically interact with your Support cases (create, edit, close) and access/refresh Trusted Advisor best practices recommendations. For more information, see the Amazon Web Services  Support Documentation.

For Enterprise-level customers, a TAM provides technical expertise for the full range of Amazon Web Services services and obtains a detailed understanding of your use case and technology architecture. TAMs work with Amazon Web Services Solution Architects to help you launch new projects and give best practices recommendations throughout the implementation life cycle. Your TAM is the primary point of contact for ongoing support needs, and you have a direct telephone line to your TAM.

For Enterprise-level customers, a TAM helps you tier, execute, and evaluate your infrastructure performance. The TAM conducts regular performance reviews, participates in requested meetings, and collaborates on new launches to ensure readiness.

Cases submitted by Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support customers are routed directly to specially trained engineers to ensure fast, accurate resolution of critical issues.

After we've responded to your case, we work with you to identify and resolve your problem. We consider cases resolved if:

• Your problem is fixed.
• The source of the problem lies with third-party software. (We’ll continue to be a resource as you work with the third party on resolution.)
• You don't respond to a query or request from us for four (4) consecutive days.

For recurring issues, you can choose to reopen the case.