Last Updated: May 6, 2022
Reciprocity hosts SaaS products (the “Service”) and provides support in accordance with this SLA to customers of the Service (“Customer” or “you”). You should be able to find help using the resources below.
There are several ways to contact Support, but the first step for most people should be to search our documentation within each of our product’s knowledge base.
If you can’t find an answer to your question, or you are affected by an outage, then customers who are in a paid subscription can submit a support ticket to the Support team by sending an email to [email protected]. It will automatically create a case in our service desk and our support team will respond according to the service levels stated within this SLA.
Using Reciprocity’s (Community Edition, a proof of concept) SaaS granted through trials or freemium product programs do not come with technical support. If you are facing issues relating to billing, purchasing, subscriptions, or licensing, please refer to the section below regarding Issues with billing, purchasing, subscriptions or licenses.
Performance of SaaS products
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Availability
Reciprocity will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that, other than for scheduled or emergency maintenance, the Service will be accessible in all material respects at least 99.9% of the time during any 30-day period. The availability of the Service may be subject to limitations, delays, and other problems inherent to the general use of the Internet and other public networks or caused by Customer or third parties. Reciprocity is not responsible for any delays or other damage resulting from problems outside of Reciprocity’s control, including problems with the Service.
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Performance Issue Corrections
If the Service is not accessible as specified in Section 1 of this SLA, Reciprocity will use commercially reasonable efforts to resolve the performance issue (“Performance Issue”) with a level of effort commensurate with the severity of the Performance Issue. Reciprocity and Customer will comply with the following resolution procedures for all Performance Issues reported by Customer:
- Notice of Performance Issue If Customer encounters a Performance Issue, Customer must sufficiently define the Performance Issue in a written notice to Reciprocity by sending an email to [email protected]. After receipt of written notice of a Performance Issue from Customer, Reciprocity will notify Customer if Reciprocity cannot identify the cause of the Performance Issue. If Reciprocity cannot identify the cause of the Performance Issue, Customer will provide additional information regarding the Performance Issue as Reciprocity may request in order to assist Reciprocity with identifying the cause of the Performance Issue. Customer will provide a separate written notice for each Performance Issue encountered by Customer.
- Performance Issue Classification In its notice of a Performance Issue, Customer will reasonably classify the initial priority of the Performance Issue. Customer will use the nature of the Performance Issue and Customer’s business situation to initially classify each Performance Issue. Customer will classify each Performance Issue in accordance with the Impact Severity table below. To the extent that Reciprocity disagrees with any Performance Issue classification provided by Customer, Reciprocity will promptly advise Customer of the revised classification of any Performance Issue.
- Response Time Reciprocity will use reasonable efforts to respond to each of Customer’s written notice of Performance Issue within the period set forth in severity classification table below. Response time is the elapsed time between Customer’s first report of an identified Performance Issue and the provision of a plan for resolution by a Reciprocity technical contact.
- Expedited Response Time To the extent that Customer may seek Reciprocity to respond to any written notice of Performance Issue within a time period other than as set forth in the table below, Customer may request such response and Reciprocity may elect to provide such additional services to Customer on terms and conditions as the parties may agree upon in writing (which may include, without limitation, additional costs and expenses payable by Customer to Reciprocity in connection with such any expedited services). Notwithstanding the foregoing, Reciprocity will have no obligation to enter into any such agreement with respect to any such additional services. To the extent that the parties enter into any such agreement which includes additional costs and expenses, Reciprocity will invoice Customer for, and Customer will pay, any such additional amounts as set forth in this Agreement before such additional services are provided by Reciprocity.
Recovery Objectives
Product Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) ZenGRC Platform 4 hours 24 hours ROAR Platform 24 hours 24 hours Impact Severity
Severity Classification Description of Performance Issue Response Time Severity 1 Your affected product is unavailable or completely unusable. A product server or cluster in production is not available, or is otherwise unusable. 4 hours Severity 2 The affected product is Highly Degraded. Significant Business Impact. Important product features are unavailable or extremely slowed, with no acceptable workaround. Implementation or production use of product is continuing; however, there is a serious impact on productivity. Example: CI Builds are erroring and not completing successfully, and the software release process is significantly affected. 8 hours Severity 3 Something is preventing normal product operation. Some Business Impact. Important product features are unavailable or somewhat slowed, but a workaround is available. Product use has a minor loss of operational functionality, regardless of the environment or usage. Example: A known bug impacts the use of product, but a workaround is successfully being used as a temporary solution. 12 hours Severity 4 Questions or Clarifications around features or documentation or deployments (72 hours) Minimal or no Business Impact. Information, an enhancement, or documentation clarification is requested, but there is no impact on the operation of product. Implementation or production use of product is continuing and work is not impeded. 72 hours Upon receipt of the issue in the Support inbox, the Support engineers will provide the initial response and together with the symptoms described and the validation of the statuses of the services and the business assessment, they will set the severity of the issue.
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Customer Obligations
- Reasonable Assistance Customer will provide Reciprocity with reasonable access to all necessary personnel to answer questions regarding Performance Issues reported by Customer.
- Good Standing The provision of the Service by Reciprocity during the term of the Agreement is contingent upon Customer’s performance of its payment and other obligations under the Agreement. Reciprocity reserves the right, in addition to other remedies available, to suspend its provision of the Service for so long as Customer is not current with its obligations.
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Habitual Failure
If the Service is unavailable on an average of less than 99.9% for three (3) consecutive months in any rolling six (6) month period, then Customer may immediately terminate this Agreement and any outstanding Order Form(s) upon written notice to Reciprocity, and receive a pro-rata refund for all unused, prepaid Fees from the date of such termination.
Contact Support
Issues with billing, purchasing, subscriptions or licenses
Plan | Support Level (First Response Time) | How to get in touch |
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All plans and purchases | First reply within 24 hours, Mon through Fri, 8AM to 5PM PST |
Open a Support Ticket and the Support team will connect you with your account team. Alternatively, you can reach out directly to your Customer Success Manager. |
Reciprocity SaaS Products
Plan | Support Level | How to get in touch |
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Free | None | Open a thread in the Reciprocity Community Forum |
Paid | First reply within 24 hours, Mon through Fri, 8AM to 5PM PST | Open a Support Ticket through [email protected] |
First time reaching support
If you just purchased a license, there are a few things to do to make sure the users maintaining your Reciprocity platform get the smoothest support experience possible.
- Your organization will be set up in our Salesforce along with the list of contacts that you expect to contact the Reciprocity Support team in case of an issue. Just in case someone is left out, circulate instructions on proving your support entitlement within your organization.
- Your organization will be provided with access to the Reciprocity platform with restricted functionalities depending on whether this is free access or paid. Within the setup of your organization in the Reciprocity platform, admin users will be set up for your organization. Please make sure your admin users have proper access to the platform.
- Your organization will also be provided with access for your users to Reciprocity University, as well as the Reciprocity Community. Please make sure you validate this access.
- Familiarize yourself with this SLA to understand the scope of what to expect in your interactions.
- Take a look at what’s included in your Support entitlement and the effect which choosing a support region has on tickets to understand the time frame in which you can expect a first response.
Accepted Language in Support tickets
Tickets to the Support team are only accepted in English. Any other languages are discarded from the Support inbox and will not be worked on. At the same time, any attached media used for ticket evidence must be sent in English.
We do not currently provide translated interfaces for our products, Reciprocity University or Reciprocity Community.
Any calls or follow up interactions will be provided in English only.
Reciprocity Support Service Levels
Trials Support
Trial or free licenses do not include support at any level. If part of your evaluation of Reciprocity includes evaluating support expertise or SLA performance, contact Sales to discuss options.
Standard Support
Standard Support is included in all paid Reciprocity SaaS products. It includes ‘Next business day support’ which means you can expect a reply to your ticket within 24 hours Mon through Fri, 8AM to 5PM PST.
Please submit your support request through email to [email protected].
Customer Support – Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Reciprocity offers Mon through Fri, 8AM to 5PM PST support excluding US federal holidays bound by the SLA times listed above.
- The SLA times listed are the time frames in which you can expect the first response.
- Reciprocity Support will work to resolve any issues to your satisfaction as quickly as possible. However, the SLA times are not to be considered as an expected time-to-resolution.
Customer Satisfaction
After a support request is closed, a Customer Satisfaction survey will be sent out.
Reciprocity tracks responses to these surveys through Salesforce Service Desk with a target of 90% customer satisfaction.
Support Management regularly reviews responses, and may contact customers who leave negative reviews for more context.
Phone and video call support
Reciprocity does not offer support via inbound or on-demand calls.
Reciprocity Support Engineers (“Engineers”) communicate with you about support requests primarily through updates in the support tickets themselves. At times it may be useful and important to conduct a call, video call, or screen sharing session with you to improve the progress of a ticket. The Engineer may suggest a call for that reason. You may also request a call if you feel one is needed. Either way, the decision to conduct a call always rests with the Engineer, who will determine:
- whether a call is necessary; and
- whether we have sufficient information for a successful call.
Once the decision has been made to schedule a call, the Engineer will:
- Send you a link (through the ticket) to our scheduling platform or a direct link to start the call.
- Update you through the ticket with: (a) an agenda and purpose for the call, (b) a list of any actions that must be taken to prepare for the call, and (c) the maximum time allowed for the call. Please expect that the call will end as soon as the stated purpose has been achieved or the time limit has been reached, whichever occurs first.
During a screen sharing session Engineers will act as a trusted advisor: providing troubleshooting steps and inviting you to run commands to help gather data or help resolve technical issues. At no time will an Engineer ask to take control of your computer or to be granted direct access to your Reciprocity platform instance.
NOTE: Calls scheduled by Reciprocity are on the Zoom platform. If you cannot use Zoom, you can request a Google Meet link. Attempts to reuse a previously-provided scheduling link to arrange an on-demand call will be considered an abuse of support, and will result in such calls being canceled.
General Support Practices
Differences Between Support Tickets and Reciprocity Issues
It’s useful to know the difference between a support ticket opened through our Support Portal vs. an issue on Reciprocity.com.
For customers with a subscription that includes support, always feel free to contact support with your issue in the first instance via email to [email protected]; it will automatically create a ticket with your case. This is the primary channel the support team uses to interact with customers and it is the only channel that is based on an SLA. Here, the Reciprocity support team will gather the necessary information and help debug the issue. In many cases, we can find a resolution without requiring input from the development team. However, sometimes debugging will uncover a bug in Reciprocity itself or that some new feature or enhancement is necessary for your use-case. In that situation the Support team will escalate the reported issue as a Feature request, or a bug/task to our engineers, depending on the nature of the issue.
Once an issue is handed off to the development team through an issue in a Reciprocity tracker, the support team will escalate and triage the issue for proper prioritization and commitment for resolution with product and engineering. The ticket will be kept open until there is a fix in place or the product and engineering team decide this won’t be fixed, closing out the issue. The support team will provide feedback on the status of the development and resolution of the issues accordingly in the original ticket. This ensures that issues remain the single channel for communication: customers, developers and support staff can communicate through only one medium.
Issue Creation
Building on the above section, when bugs, regressions, or any application behaviors/actions not working as intended are reported or discovered during support interactions, the Reciprocity Support Team will create issues in Reciprocity project repositories on behalf of our customers.
Working Effectively in Support Tickets
As best you can, please help the support team by communicating the issue you’re facing, or question you’re asking, with as much detail as available to you. Whenever possible, include:
- log files relevant to the situation.
- steps that have already been taken towards resolution.
- relevant environmental details, such as the architecture.
We expect for non-emergency tickets to take 20-30 minutes to formulate the support ticket with relevant information. A ticket without the above information will reduce the efficacy of support.
In subsequent replies, the support team may ask you follow-up questions. Please do your best to read through the entirety of the reply and answer any such questions in a timely manner. If there are any additional troubleshooting steps, or requests for additional information please do your best to provide it.
The more information the team is equipped with in each reply will result in faster resolution. For example, if a support engineer has to ask for logs, it will result in more cycles. If a ticket comes in with everything required, multiple engineers will be able to analyze the problem and will have what is necessary to further escalate to developers if so required.
Please don’t send encrypted messages
Some organizations use 3rd party services to encrypt or automatically expire messages. As a matter of security, please do not include any sensitive information in the body or attachments in tickets. All interactions with Reciprocity Support should be in plain-text.
Reciprocity Engineers will not click on URLs contained within tickets or interact with these types of 3rd party services to provide support. If you do send such a reply, an engineer will politely ask you to submit your support ticket in plain text, and link you to this section of our SLA.
If there’s a pressing reason for which you need to send along an encrypted file or communication, please discuss it with the Engineer in the ticket.
Please don’t send files in formats that can contain executable code
Many common file formats, such as Microsoft Office files and PDF, can contain executable code which can be run automatically when the file is opened. As a result, these types of files are often used as a computer attack vector.
Reciprocity Engineers will not download files or interact with these type of files. If you send a file in a format of concern, an Engineer will ask you to submit your attachments in an accepted format, and link you to this section of the Support page.
Examples of acceptable formats include:
- Plain Text files (.txt, .rtf, .csv, .json, yaml)
- Images (.jpg, .gif, .png)
Do not contact Support Engineers directly outside of issues or support cases
Reciprocity Support engages with users via email to [email protected] This method of communication allows for efficiency and collaboration, and ensures both parties’ safety while addressing problems that may arise. No attempts should be made to receive support via direct individual email, social media, or other communication methods used by Reciprocity team members. Use of these unofficial methods to obtain support may be considered abuse of the platform. Repeat violations may result in termination of your support contract and/or business relationship with Reciprocity.
If you contact a Support Engineer directly, they’ll reply with a short explanation and a link to this paragraph.
Sanitizing data attached to Support Tickets
If relevant to the problem and helpful in troubleshooting, a Reciprocity Support Engineer will request information regarding configuration files or logs.
We encourage customers to sanitize all secret, confidential, and/or private information before sharing them in a Reciprocity Support ticket.
Sensitive items that should never be shared include:
- credentials
- passwords
- tokens
- keys
- secrets
Support for Reciprocity on restricted or offline networks
Reciprocity Support may request logs in Support tickets or ask you to screen share in customer calls if it would be the most efficient and effective way to troubleshoot and solve the problem.
Under certain circumstances, sharing logs or screen sharing may be difficult or impossible due to our customers’ internal network security policies.
Reciprocity Support will never ask our customers to violate their internal security policies, however Support Engineers do not know the details of our customers’ internal network security policies.
In situations where internal or network security policies would prevent you from sharing logs or screen sharing with Reciprocity Support, please communicate this as early as possible in the ticket so we can adjust the workflows and methods we use to troubleshoot.
Customer policies preventing the sharing of log or configuration information with Support may lengthen the time to resolution for tickets. In some cases, the lack of specific information may lead to the support team or escalated engineering teams to be unable to reproduce the exact conditions of an issue, with the consequent inability to provide a proper fix.
Customer policies preventing screen sharing during Reciprocity Support customer calls may impact a Support Engineer’s ability to resolve issues during a scheduled call.
Solving Tickets
If a customer explains that they are satisfied their concern is being addressed properly in an issue created on their behalf, then the conversation should continue within the issue itself, and Reciprocity support will close the support ticket. Should a customer wish to reopen a support ticket, they can simply reply to it and it will automatically be reopened.
Reciprocity Instance Migration
If a customer requests assistance in migrating their Reciprocity platform instance to a new instance, you can direct them to submit a Support ticket. Support will assist with any issues that arise from the Reciprocity migration. However, the setup and configuration of the new instance outside of Reciprocity specific configuration, like SSO setup, is considered out of scope and Support will not be able to assist with any resulting issues.
Handling Unresponsive Tickets
To prevent an accumulation of tickets for which we have not received a response within a specific timescale, we have established the following process. If the ticket owner (our customer) fails to respond within 2 business days after the first salutation or after evidence or feedback is required, the Support team will contact the ticket owner a second time to allow them for 2 more business days. After this time the ticket will be resolved for lack of feedback and closed by Reciprocity.
Restoration of Deleted Data
Any type of data restoration is currently a manual and time consuming process led by Reciprocity’s infrastructure team. Data can only be restored in full and not in part from snapshots.
Reciprocity will consider restoration requests only when the request is part of a paid plan with an active subscription applied, and:
- the data was deleted due to a Reciprocity bug or error.
Please note that user accounts and individual contributions cannot be restored.
Ownership Disputes
Reciprocity will not act as an arbitrator of group or account ownership disputes. Each user and group owner is responsible for ensuring that they are following best practices for data security.
Name Squatting Policy
Account name squatting is prohibited by Reciprocity. Account names on Reciprocity are administered to users on a first-come, first-serve basis. Accordingly, account names cannot be held or remain inactive for future use.
The Reciprocity Support Team will consider a namespace (instance or organization) to fall under the provisions of this policy when the client has not logged in or otherwise used the namespace for an extended time.
Namespaces will be released, if eligible under the criteria below, upon request by a member of a paid namespace or sales approved prospect.
Specifically:
- An instance or organization hasn’t logged in the platform for more than 90 days.
- The Customer has decided not to renew their contract and is terminated.
- In the case of termination, the instance can be kept active for up to 30 calendar days beyond the termination date for the sole purpose of data extraction or similar. All access by the Customer to the namespace will be removed.
If the namespace contains data, Reciprocity Support will attempt to contact the owner over a two week period before releasing the namespaces. If the namespace contains no data (empty or no projects) and the owner is inactive, the namespace will be released immediately.
Namespaces associated with unconfirmed accounts over 90 days old are eligible for immediate release.
Namespace & Trademarks
Reciprocity SaaS product namespaces are available on a first come, first served basis and cannot be reserved. No brand, company, entity, or persons own the rights to any namespace in Reciprocity SaaS products and may not claim them based on a trademark. Any dispute regarding namespaces and trademarks must be resolved by the parties involved. Reciprocity Support will never act as arbitrators or intermediaries in these disputes and will not take any action without the appropriate legal orders.
Naming conventions have been defined to model after the company’s own URL and name. Suffixes may be added to indicate the type of namespace that has been provisioned (production/test/demo/etc). Names cannot start with numbers and the minimum of characters is set to 3.
Log requests
Reciprocity Support cannot provide raw copies of logs. However, if users have concerns, Support can answer specific questions and provide summarized information related to the content of log files.
For paid users of Reciprocity Service, many actions are logged in the Audit events section of your Reciprocity Service project or group.
Further resources
Additional resources for getting help, reporting issues, requesting features, and so forth can be found in the Reciprocity University, as well as the Reciprocity Community.