Khoros Standard Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Capitalized terms that are not defined in this SLA shall have the definition provided in the Master Services Agreement (MSA).
Definitions
“Covered Down Time” means Down Time, as measured by Khoros's primary operational monitoring harness, which is not caused by Force Majeure, by Customer’s acts, or by a third party who is not a subcontractor to Khoros (e.g., third party Social Media Network or ISP), and which is not scheduled Down Time. While Khoros shall use commercially reasonable efforts to take actions it deems appropriate to remedy and avoid such events, Covered Down Time does not include any reasonably unforeseeable interruption or degradation in service due to actions or inactions caused by third parties, including but not limited to DDoS attacks.
“Down Time” means time when a failure impairs or prevents: (a) for the Khoros Community Subscription Services, the initiation of new user requests for Khoros service and continued use of the Service is not available to at least 50% of Customer’s End Users, (b) for the Khoros Care Subscription Services, at least 50% of Customer Users are unable to log in and/or are unable to write to, and/or receive messages from a primary social media network to which Khoros connects (i.e., Twitter and/or Facebook), or (c) when Khoros's Performance goals, described below, are not achieved.
“Final Resolution” means a bug fix or update that corrects the Incident with a long-term solution that restores the original or equivalent functionality.
“General Release” means the most current, publicly available release of the respective Khoros platform.
“Initial Response” means the first response and assignment of a Service Incident number by Khoros to a Customer’s submission of a Service Incident.
“Primary Function” means the core feature & functionality of the Khoros Subscription Services. For the Khoros Community Subscription Services, this consists of the ability to read, write and reply to threads and boards. For the Khoros Care Subscription Services, this consists of the ability to read, write and reply to the primary Social Media Networks (i.e. Twitter and Facebook).
“Service Incident” means an individual request submitted to Khoros on behalf of Customer. Each request generates a Service Incident and is uniquely identified with a Service Incident case number.
“Temporary Resolution” means a workaround to the Service Incident that provides substantially equivalent functionality without material business disruption.
Khoros Platform Availability Commitments
Hosting Facilities. Khoros shall host the Content and Applications at geographically distributed hosting facilities whose services include secure data centers, infrastructure, redundant bandwidth peering, redundant power with backup generators, and environmental control systems. Hosting Facilities shall maintain annual ISAE 3402 or SSAE 16 SOC 1 or 2 audits, ISO 27001:2005 security standard certification or substantial conformity with ISO 27002 code of practice or similar. For more information on data processing locations, Content access locations, and Khoros's subprocessors, see: https://community.khoros.com/t5/Policies-and-Guidelines/What-companies-are-subprocessors-to-Khoros/ta-p/207777 24/7 monitoring. Khoros shall monitor and maintain the Applications for all of the systems within Khoros's control necessary to maintain the Applications, including the monitoring of system utilization, storage utilization, and network utilization. Khoros shall provide Customer with 24x7 emergency contact channels for Severity 1 incident reporting. Khoros shall promptly report all broadly impacting outages, including performance degradation, to our public status page. The URL of the status page is posted on the community in our Support Guidelines. Broadly impacting is identified as approximately 20% of Khoros's subscription base.
99.9% uptime; Remedies: Credits and Termination. Subject to the provisions of this SLA, Khoros shall provide 99.9% uptime measured calendar monthly. If in any calendar month during the applicable Subscription Duration, uptime falls below 99.9% (i.e., Covered Down Time exceeds 0.1%), then the following shall apply:
(a) Customer shall be entitled to 2 minutes of service credit for each full minute of Covered Down Time, with a minimum of 1 hour of service credit per each calendar day on which Covered Down Time occurs; Covered Down Time in excess of 60 minutes within a given calendar day, Customer shall be entitled to 1 day of service credit for each such calendar day (in each case an “Eligible Service Credit”). Eligible Service Credits shall be applied at the conclusion of the Subscription Duration. To receive Eligible Service Credits, Customer must notify Khoros no later than 30 calendar days from the time Customer becomes eligible to receive such credits; and,
(b) Covered Down Time in excess of 8 hours in any calendar month shall constitute “Monthly Covered Down Time”. Three (3) events of Monthly Covered Down Time in any consecutive 6 month period shall constitute material breach of the Service Order applicable to the affected Service, and Customer shall have the right to terminate the applicable Service Order upon five (5) days written notice to Khoros.
Reporting. Upon request, Customer shall be provided root cause analysis (“RCA”) reports for Covered Downtime. RCA reports will be delivered within 7 business days. In some cases, the RCA may be updated one or more times after it is delivered if additional information is discovered or third-party data becomes available.
Scheduled Down Time. Khoros shall schedule Down Time with at least three (3) days prior notice to the Customer. Such Down Time shall be reasonably scheduled during typically minimal traffic hours and days for Customer. However, Khoros may schedule Down Time at any time of the day with shorter or no notice if Khoros reasonably determines that a failure to act immediately could lead to material harm to either Khoros or Customer. Khoros also reserves fifteen (15) minutes per day, at times of minimal traffic, for regular site maintenance with no prior notification. Khoros Scheduled Down Time shall not exceed 8 hours per month.
Usage Limits. Khoros's Platform Availability Commitments (“PAC”) shall apply to Customer as long as: (i) Customer is current on its payment obligations to Khoros, and (ii) if applicable, Customer’s actual usage remains under the applicable Usage Limits specified in the Service Order, and, (iii) further, for Khoros Community subscriptions, Customer’s actual usage does not exceed 10 million RSS feed views per month, 1 million in email volume generated by page subscriptions per month, and/or 40 million attachment segments per month. For purposes of the foregoing, “RSS feed views” means the number of messages pushed via RSS and “attachment segments” means the number of 25kb data blocks uploaded or downloaded as attachments. However, Khoros shall make commercially reasonable efforts to maintain its PAC requirements within Customer’s existing provisioning in all circumstances.
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Plans - During the term of the Agreement, Khoros will have a disaster recovery plan in place for the hosting location from which the Platform is provided. If Khoros's disaster recovery plan is invoked, Khoros will restore the Platform to the service availability service level described above in accordance with the requirements of such plan. In addition, Khoros will have an annually tested business continuity plan in place to assist Khoros in reacting to a disaster in a planned and tested manner.
Khoros Support Commitments
Customer service. Khoros shall provide Customer service in accordance with the contracted support level. The information below is applicable to all support levels.
Designated Contacts. Customer must designate two (2) individuals to represent Customer in regard to all support issues and the technical and business relationship between Customer and Khoros (“Designated Contact(s)”). The Designated Contacts will be the primary decision makers for Customer for any changes, approvals, or modifications where Customer approval is needed to resolve an issue. It is Customer’s responsibility to ensure that Khoros has accurate Designated Contacts in order to ensure timely issue resolution where approval is required.
Submitting incident requests. Customer must submit their incident request via online ticket through the Community Case Portal. To access the portal, visit the Khoros Community and go to “Case Portal”. Support levels above standard may change the request options.
For Severity Level 1 service incidents only, Customer may email outage@khoros.com or Customer may also report Severity 1 issues via the Case Portal.
Hours of operation. For Severity 1 service incidents, Khoros hours of operation are 24/7/365. For all other incidents, standard hours of operation for Khoros Support are as follows:
Region | Hours (Regional) | Hours (PST) |
Americas | 6 AM – 6 PM PST | 6 AM – 6 PM PST |
EMEA | 7 AM – 6 PM GMT | 11 PM - 10 AM PST |
APAC | 7 AM – 4 PM IST | 5:30 PM – 2:30 AM PST |
Coverage for major holidays, as defined by Khoros regional support, is limited to Severity 1 issues only.
Language support. In order to provide the most consistent, high quality support to our Customer across the globe, all requests must be in English and Khoros will respond in kind.
Response to service incidents. Unless otherwise classified through the Case Portal, Khoros shall consider all issues to be Severity 3 by default. Upon triage, Khoros shall, in good faith, determine the classification/severity of the service incident and shall respond in accordance with the applicable Support Response Time indicated below for the support level that Customer has purchased in the applicable Service Order. Any incident that meets the Severity 1 definitions below production system outage automatically triggers a 24x7 commitment until resolution. Lower priority issues are ranked based on impact to the Customer and issue complexity. Khoros shall make the final determination regarding Severity Level assignment.
Targeted Resolution: Khoros does not commit to specific resolution times due to the varying levels of complexity involved in any specific issue.
Incident Severity Definitions & Classification.
Incident Severity | Definition |
Severity 1 | A critical problem with the Production application in which any of the following occur:
Application is down, inoperable, inaccessible, unavailable or materially ceases operation. Widespread performance or nonperformance of the application prevents critical work from being done with no workaround available. Major security incident that results in Covered Down Time.
Customer resources must be made available in Severity Level 1 situations and reasonably cooperate to help resolve the issue. Only production instances may be classified in this manner.
Severity Level 1 problems could have the following characteristics:
For Khoros Community
A widespread production system outage resulting in Covered Downtime and the SaaS platform is completely unusable. Primary functionality unavailable or system is unable to operate, even on a severely restricted basis. Data security breaches, reported by either Customer or Khoros internal security.
For Khoros Care
Inability of multiple users to post to a specific channel, load the application, or login to the system No new content flowing into the application across multiple customers Critical security-related issues
For Khoros Care - Flow (bots) Bot degradation Authentication fails for all users Saving/Loading flow, intents fails Analytics Degradation Broadcast Degradation Versions Promotion degradation
For Khoros Marketing
Unable to reach login page, login not working or OTP undelivered Unable to load landing page Unable to view Calendar Unable to view approvals Unable to publish organic or paid to ANY of the supported networks
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Severity 2 | A problem with the Applications in which any of the following occur:
The Applications are severely limited or degraded, primary functions are not performing properly, the situation is causing a significant impact to a high percentage of Applications licensed users’ operations or productivity; or the Applications have been interrupted but recovered, and there is high risk of recurrence.
Severity Level 2 problems could have the following characteristics:
For Khoros Community
Degraded performance impacting >50% of users Primary functionality unavailable but the system is able to operate in a restricted fashion Widespread degradation impacting non-primary functions without a workaround Community Analytics & data are unavailable Critical or high level security vulnerabilities No reasonable workaround is available
For Khoros Care
Systems operating in a restricted fashion Significantly degraded performance for > 50% of the users Analytics or data temporarily unavailable A workaround may be available, but it is very inconvenient
For Khoros Marketing
Application performance is degraded and it takes >3-5 seconds to load the pages Primary functions are not functioning (example: clicking buttons or links do not load imperative features) Applications have been interrupted, high risk of issue recurrence or inconsistent behavior Unable to view specific posts on the Calendar Unable to approve specific posts Unable to manage Social accounts on the platform Unable to publish specific types of organic or paid content for one of the supported networks
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Severity 3 | A problem with the Applications in which any of the following occur: the problem impacts primary business operations, but there is a workaround available that may not scale effectively; the problem is localized or has isolated impact and can easily be circumvented; customers work has minor loss of operational functionality.
Severity Level 3 problems could have the following characteristics:
Performance degradation Incorrect data on reports Incorrect product behavior with business impact Short-term workaround is available, but not scalable.
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Severity 4 | A minor or cosmetic problem with the Applications in which any of the following occur: the problem is an irritant, affects non-essential functions, has minimal impact to business operations; the problem is an operational nuisance; the problem results in documentation errors, or the problem is any other problem that is not classified as above but is otherwise a failure of the Applications to conform to its specifications as described in the Documentation.
Severity Level 4 problems could have the following characteristics:
Error messages with easy workaround General requests for advice on product usage Clarification on product documentation or release notes Product enhancement request Questions on product functionality or configuration
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Severity 1 Service Incident Submission and Handling. For all Level 1 severity issues (“Severity 1”), Customer shall engage via either the Case Portal registering it as a Severity 1 or email outage@khoros.com and a Severity 1 Service Incident will be automatically logged. Khoros shall provide updates to Customer regarding its progress toward resolution of Severity 1 issues at regular intervals, initially targeted to be no more than every 30 minutes (or as the parties may otherwise agree) until a resolution or work-around has been provided. Reproducible errors that cannot promptly be resolved will be escalated to Khoros engineering personnel for further investigation and analysis before being returned to Customer for additional information. Updates will be provided via email in Service Incident.
For issues that affect multiple customers, a status page link will be provided through the Service Incident.
Security Vulnerabilities. Khoros commits to reviewing all security issues in an expedited manner. Once a report is deemed a security concern by Khoros's security operations team, issues are moved out of the standard incident process for higher priority.
Prioritization. Khoros requests that customers assist with prioritizing their issues through the Case Portal. This ensures that Khoros support focuses on those issues most important, at that point in time, to the customer. This prioritization (High, Normal, and Low) is separate from Severity levels as defined above and reflects instead the customer’s specific priority in the context of that customer’s business operations.
Cooperation & Error Reproduction. Khoros must be able to reproduce errors in order to resolve them. Customer agrees to cooperate and work closely with Khoros to reproduce errors, including conducting diagnostic or troubleshooting activities as requested and appropriate. Customer agrees to provide Khoros with all information and materials reasonably requested by Khoros for use in replicating, diagnosing and correcting an error or other support issue reported by Customer. Also, subject to Customer's approval on a case-by-case basis, users may be asked to provide remote access to their Khoros application and/or desktop system for troubleshooting purposes.
In submitting a Service Incident (each individual request being a “Service Incident”) to Khoros, Customer will send a complete and accurate report that includes (a) a reasonably detailed description of the request, together with any supporting information that Customer’s engineers believe will assist Khoros in its diagnostic process; (b) any error message(s) or other message(s) generated by the system in association with the request; (c) any applicable trace files and/or logs; (d) a test case or instructions necessary to demonstrate the request; and (e) identification of any additional information or artifacts (such as dumps, logs, etc.) that are, or can be made, available. Khoros may request specific information in addition to the aforementioned requirements for submission. Customer acknowledges that the implementation of General Releases provided by Khoros may be necessary to ensure the proper operation. Khoros shall not have obligations under support services to remedy issues that will be fixed by implementation of that General Current Release.
Customizations. Khoros commits to working through core Subscription Services issues, however, Khoros does not support customizations built by customers and its partners. Changes implemented by the Customer’s development team are covered only under advanced support levels.
The following provisions are applicable only to subscribers to the Khoros Community Subscription Services:
Studio Publishing. Customers using Studio Publishing can deploy Studio customization work to their Production environment at their desired time without Khoros's involvement.. If customers perform a deployment, the deployment can be canceled or rollbacked from Preview to Production through Studio Publish. However, deployment performed by Khoros on behalf of the customers through Support or Professional Services cannot be canceled or rolled back by the customer through Studio Publish, only Khoros Support or Professional Services can roll back such deployments.
Studio Publishing shall be temporarily disabled in the following scenarios:
Khoros is not responsible for Down Time caused by errors introduced by Customer’s own work that is then deployed by Customer using Studio Publishing.
Rollback. Khoros shall keep at least one level of rollback to allow undoing any patch, update, or upgrade deployed by Khoros.
Upon notification of Down Time introduced by a Studio Publishing deployment, Khoros shall handle Rollback of Customer-introduced changes that caused the Down Time, and initiate redeployment of Customer’s environments to the last known good configuration, potentially undoing all customization work done by Customer or Khoros since the last successful deployment.
Reverse Proxy Implementation. Customer use of a reverse proxy configuration must be implemented in accordance with the appropriate implementation process specified by Khoros and set forth in the Statement of Work. Customer shall provide all of the requested information, follow the specified guidelines and cooperate as required in accordance with the SOW during the term of the Agreement while employing a reverse proxy configuration. Apart from addressing performance issues strictly caused by Khoros actions or systems unaffected by and independent of the reverse proxy, the terms of this SLA shall not apply to the Services and Khoros shall have no obligation to comply with such terms. All reverse proxy configuration must be through a Professional Services SOW. Without that, Khoros is not obligated to support any issues caused by non-Khoros prescribed implementation process. In case of a non-Khoros prescribed implementation, Khoros will give a 30 day deadline for customers to fix the RP implementation in accordance with Khoros prescribed methods. Customers then can either choose to remove RP or work through a services SOW to correct the implementation.
Performance. Khoros shall provide response times below 500 ms median latency, calculated on a calendar monthly basis for all non-customized pages. Latency is measured for first byte from a point within the physical network and excludes computationally intensive pages such as search and real-time analytics, internal user pages and auto-archived message pages. Khoros reserves the right to use a static page on the Application instance for testing purposes.
Appendix 1: Khoros Support Levels
Please see Customer’s Customer Success Manager or Account Executive for all current available options with regards to Khoros Support Services. Khoros offers a variety of support levels to accommodate the needs and preferences of its customers. All Customers must have an active subscription and support level to be eligible to request assistance. All support levels are subject to change by Khoros.
