Glossary
Technical Support (tiers and severity)
Technical support is the structured service a vendor provides to help customers resolve product issues, typically organised into response-time tiers and issue severity levels.
General definition
Technical support for enterprise software is organised along two dimensions: tiers that reflect the depth of expertise applied to an issue, and severity levels (also called priority levels) that reflect the urgency and business impact.
- L1 / Tier 1: first-contact support, handles common questions and known issues from documentation
- L2 / Tier 2: product-specialist support, investigates configuration issues and reproduces bugs
- L3 / Tier 3: engineering-level support, reads source code, writes patches, escalates to the product team
- P1 / Severity 1: service is completely down or a critical feature is unavailable for all users
- P2 / Severity 2: major functionality impaired but a workaround exists
- P3 / Severity 3: non-critical issue affecting some users or a specific feature
- P4 / Severity 4: cosmetic issue, documentation request, or low-impact question
The SLA maps severity levels to initial response-time commitments, for example “P1 acknowledged within one hour, resolved within four hours.” First response time and resolution time are distinct; the SLA often commits only to the former.
In the Ethora ecosystem
On a cloud-hosted plan, support access and response-time commitments are determined by your pricing tier. Entry tiers typically include community or email support with business-hours response targets. Higher tiers add dedicated account contacts, faster P1 response times, and escalation paths to engineering. The provider’s team serves many customers on shared infrastructure, which can mean slower context acquisition for complex issues.
With a dedicated or self-hosted Ethora deployment, the support team works directly against your environment. L3 escalations land with engineers who know the specific configuration of your cluster rather than a generic shared deployment. For regulated buyers in healthcare or finance, a named support contact with documented response-time commitments is often a procurement requirement. Ethora offers dedicated support tiers with P1 commitments, a private Slack channel, and access to L3 engineers. See pricing or contact the team to scope the right support tier for your deployment.
