Understand Your Support Entitlement

Having worked in few companies and handle tons of escalations, often realize how many customers are not aware that Support from vendors does comes with some differences. Not all support entitlements are the same. I also talk about the support severity while back you can read up here.

Let use VMware Software Support for comparison here. Using only basic and production support. (This is not all the types of support but for this discussion we will use these two.)

Although its very clearly stated the difference between Basic and Production support mainly due to the response time and the hours of operations. There is something in common which I often realize many customer due to their internal policy required. That is Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Both support entitlement does not include. 

So if you need this, how are you going to go about it if you are not entitled. Many customer would use escalation as one channel. However, this can only be used that many times and not infinite. And not always been granted.

Before you actually decide what support you need, you should assess what your requirement is needed in your company environment. Typically support that comes with RCA do cost more. Cost cannot be use to justify for selection of entitlement since if RCA is needed.

Designing and environment with solutions is key. Getting the support to help with your day 2 operations issue is crucial.