Basic, Advanced, and Premium support plans

You can choose a Basic, Advanced, or Premium support plan to customize your IBM Cloud® support experience for your business needs. The level of support that you select determines the severity that you can assign to support cases and your level of access to the tools available in the Support Center.

If you have free support, you're provided technical support through Stack Overflow. Also, with a Lite account and free support, you can open cases that are related to access management, accounts, and billing and usage. If you want to upgrade your support plan, contact a IBM Cloud Sales representative.

Initial response Service Level Objectives (SLO) do not apply to any billing, invoice, or sales related inquiry or cases.

The following table shows the support types available for Pay-As-You-Go accounts, Subscription accounts, and the Enterprise Savings Plan billing model. For more information about accounts, see Account types.

Table 1. Support plans
	Basic	Advanced	Premium
Description	Basic business protection that is included with your IBM Cloud Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account	Prioritized case handling and support experience that is aligned with your business needs for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model	Client engagement that is aligned with your business outcomes to accelerate time-to-value for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model
Availability	24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases Phone and chat are available only for Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription accounts	24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases, phone, and chat	24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through cases, phone, and chat
Case severity	Not applicable	Case severity ranking available	Case severity ranking available
Initial response time objectives	Not applicable	Severity 1: Less than one hour Severity 2: Less than two hours Severity 3: Less than four hours Severity 4: Less than eight hours	Severity 1: Less than 15 minutes Severity 2: Less than one hour Severity 3: Less than two hours Severity 4: Less than four hours
Additional support	Not applicable	Not applicable	Technical Account Manager assigned Quarterly business reviews Access to experts
Pricing	Included with cloud entitlement	Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at USD 200 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption	Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at USD 10,000 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption

For Enterprise Savings Plans, there is a minimum commitment for Advanced and Premium support. If you don't spend the total committed amount by the end of the commitment term, you are invoiced for the amount that you didn't consume, and any amount used over the commitment is also charged. For more information, contact a IBM Cloud Sales representative.

Premium support

Premium support is for mission-critical environments that have a strategic dependency on IBM Cloud. The additional features of Premium support provide you the comfort in knowing that IBM Cloud has you covered in any situation. With your Premium support plan you get a technical account manager that advises you on processes, policies, and best practices related to the platform or infrastructure services. In addition, your technical account manager assists you with:

Issue management. Your technical account manager works with the IBM Cloud Support team to reduce time-to-resolution.
Onboarding assistance. Your technical account manager helps with cloud onboarding and serves as your advocate, aligning resources to meet your needs.
Platform and infrastructure maintenance. Your technical account manager alerts you about maintenance events or service end of life that might impact your environment.
Event management. The technical account manager can arrange architectural support on scaling and high availability for critical customer events such as maintenance, promotions, or holiday events.
Seminars and events. Your technical account manager ensures that your teams are engaged in IBM events and conferences.
Quarterly business reviews. Your technical account manager provides periodic business reviews of cloud usage, support case activity, escalations, upcoming planned maintenance, upcoming EOL/EOS dates and how to plan for those, and reviews of your users and permissions.

Premium support for events

On a case-by-case basis, your technical account manager can provide and help coordinate additional support for large-scale, customer-initiated events. The following details describe the event support.

Time critical actions, including:
- Meet with the event team to review the details of the event.
- Review critical functions and services that are required.
- Highlight key dates and times for actions.
- Assemble the team to ensure that plans are understood and actions are defined.
A support plan with crisis management, including:
- Review the plan from previous years' event and post feedback actions.
- Revise the plan to ensure that roles and responsibilities are understood.
- Ensure that all service teams are aware of the event and ready for any activity that requires quick assistance or resolution.
- Ensure that any maintenance activity is known and understood.
A create and practice plan. Actions include:
- A dry run of plan and expected or probable issue management.
- Test that the alert notifications are working as expected.
- Post an event review.
An event postmortem review and retrospective, including:
- A postmortem with service teams to highlight any areas for improvement.
- Documenting and updating the plan for future events.

Advanced support

Advanced support is for environments with a limited number of business-critical applications.

Basic support

Basic support is provided for non-production environments or workloads that don't require traditional severities and response times.

Support level and enterprises

The level of support that is assigned to an IBM Cloud enterprise defaults to the highest support plan within the enterprise. All child accounts within the enterprise also default to the highest support plan.

Technical support team

IBM Cloud supports our customers with a worldwide team of experts that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These resources are at strategic IBM locations around the world. IBM Cloud support resources, which are known as the Advanced Customer Support team, is made up of technical engineers that have specific domain knowledge to triage and troubleshoot problems quickly and effectively.

The teams are organized by technology domains, which include compute, network, security, storage, VPC, Kubernetes service, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Satellite, databases, app development, and cognitive solutions. Our teams keep their skills and technical knowledge up-to-date through specialized training on cloud services throughout the year. Support engineers are equipped to go deep on issues and solve most without any additional support from our backend teams. Collaboration across cloud service teams ensures continuous knowledge transfer and skills development within the team to deliver the best possible service to our customers.