Partner operations guide

Partner Support Responsibilities

Partner technical support includes the ability to perform the following for customers:

• Provide general service information.

• Provide configuration support.

• Filter non-technical problems from technical problems.

• Support problem isolation and service defect determination.

• Analyze where the error occurred.

• Restore improperly configured settings, which are applied by a customer or the partner, to remediate the issue.

• Resolve issues with any partner-managed application or infrastructure.

• Forecast capacity management requirements for new users beyond initial requirements.

• Configure application features and perform user provisioning.

• Handle customer billing and invoicing.

• Own the customer relationship.

• Manage solution integration of PSTN services.

• Manage customer readiness for Dedicated Instance upgrades, certificate renewal and infrastructure maintenance.

When the partner engages with Cisco TAC for support, the partner is responsible for aiding in triaging issues. This responsibility includes the following:

• Capturing and providing the details of reported issues

• Aiding in replication and triaging issues as requested by Cisco TAC

• Aiding in testing fixes

• Confirming that issues are not related to hardware, software, applications, or other sources provided by the end user.

It is the partner’s responsibility to ensure that the following types of technical support needs are addressed for their customers.

Partner Technical Support Requirements

When the partner escalates a support need to Cisco TAC, the partner must provide the following information:

General Case Information

• Provide valid Subscription Number or Service Contract Number.

• Callers must identify themselves as Partner Support team members representing the partner or a resold customer account.

• The name, phone number, and email address of the Partner Representative or generic Partner information for the team escalating to Cisco.

When contacting Cisco Cloud Support, identify the partner, customer, and issue.

Cisco Support Roles and Responsibilities

Cisco is responsible for providing support to the partner for the Dedicated Instance Cloud service within the Cisco Cloud data center, including remediation and a high-level root cause analysis of the issue (Cisco will not provide detailed infrastructure level information in the root cause analysis).In case of Severity 1 or Severity 2 incidents, Cisco will proactively notify partners via email.

Cisco is not responsible for supporting:

• Partner or customer network and equipment that is connected to the Dedicated Instance Cloud data center and customer premises.

  Enhanced Survivability Node deployed in customer’s premise will be joint responsibility of partner/customer and Cisco.

• Third-party software or hardware

  The partner is responsible for obtaining support or updates to third-party software or hardware if that is determined to be the cause of the incident.

Support Related Notifications and Alerts

Partners receive alerts and maintenance bulletins in Control Hub for the declaration, and resolution of identified outages to core services. Partners also receive advance notice of impactful maintenance activities or those extending outside of reserved maintenance windows.

These alerts are sent to partners who have enrolled for Control Hub alerts for “Maintenance and Outages” notifications, refer Alerts in Control Hub. Partners are responsible for ensuring that Cisco has accurate, current contact information. Cisco recommends for administrators to create an account and use Webex Application for notifications.

Maintenance

Maintenance window

Cisco notifies the partner of planned maintenance activities. All planned changes occur in a maintenance window. Cisco provides the partner a written notice of at least 10 business days in advance for planned maintenance that will disrupt customer calling ability. These alerts are sent to partners who have enrolled for Control Hub alerts for “Maintenance and outages” notifications, refer Alerts in Control Hub. Partners are responsible for ensuring that Cisco has accurate, current contact information. Cisco recommends for administrators to create an account and use Webex Application for notifications.

Maintenance includes the following activities:

• Routine maintenance activities that have a minimum risk of customer impact

• Planned and scheduled activities which will disrupt calling ability for the customer.

• Routine renewals of Cisco managed UC application Certificates. The renewals are based on the validity period and renewal date & time of the certificates. Cisco renews the certificates of UC applications only 3-7 days before the expiration date and follows the standard change management process.

  For Customers who have enabled single sign-on (SSO) in UC applications, once the certificate renewal is completed by Cisco it’s required by the partner to disable SSO, reimport the IDP metadata file and re-enable SSO. It’s also recommended for the partner or customer to validate the SSO.

  The maintenance window for the SME cluster will be scheduled according to the SME's publisher region.

The maintenance windows are as follows for AMER:

• 9 p.m. ET through 6 a.m. ET, Monday through Friday

• 9 p.m. ET through 6 a.m. ET, on weekends (Cisco's infrastructure maintenance only)

The maintenance windows are as follows for APJC:

• 9 p.m. JST through 6 a.m. JST, Monday through Friday

• 9 p.m. JST through 6 a.m. JST, on weekends (Cisco's infrastructure maintenance only)

The maintenance windows are as follows for AUS:

• 9 p.m. ACT through 6 a.m. ACT, Monday through Friday

• 9 p.m. ACT through 6 a.m. ACT, on weekends (Cisco's infrastructure maintenance only)

The maintenance windows are as follows for EU, EMEA and UK:

• 9 p.m. CET through 6 a.m. CET, Monday through Friday

• 9 p.m. CET through 6 a.m. CET, on weekends (Cisco's infrastructure maintenance only)

When planning maintenance, Cisco will make every attempt to minimize and/or eliminate the chance for any phone service disruption based on the Dedicated Instance geo-redundant architecture. Cisco expects all partner and customer lead configurations adhere to Dedicated Instance best practices for redundancy. Cisco isn’t responsible for a loss in redundancy due to misconfiguration by the partner. It’s the responsibility of the partner to validate and test all the 3rd-party integrations which aren’t hosted/managed in Dedicated Instance cloud.

Cisco initiates upgrades of UC applications only for the following reasons:

1. There’s a security vulnerability in the current version of the UC application and the fix requires an upgrade or COP installation.

2. Customer is currently in a version less than n-1 (of the current Dedicated Instance supported version) or in a version which is approaching EOL.

3. Partners can also request for an upgrade through a TAC case if there’s a new feature support available in later versions of the UC application.

Cisco sends a maintenance notification to partner and customer 10 days before the change window, and it’s recommended that the partner responds to Cisco within 2-3 days if the proposed change schedule conflicts with their business priorities. This allows Cisco to find an alternative change window (weekdays and weekends) (the rescheduled date is as per Cisco’s operations available dates only). However, in urgent or emergency scenarios, such as severe security vulnerability fix, certificates nearing expirations, the flexibility to change the maintenance window won’t be possible.

The partner can reschedule the maintenance by emailing to ucm-cloud-change-management@cisco.com with detailed reason for the reschedule.

Partner requested changes

Partner-requested changes require a joint review to assess the impact on Dedicated Instance. These include changes that the partner wants Cisco to make and changes that the partner wants to make. For example:

• Configuration changes that affect boundary devices or application integration

• Requests to deactivate a service.

Requests for large changes, such as deactivating a service, are submitted to the Cisco. The partner captures the requirements and submits to Cisco through Partner Success Team or Account Manager, to initiate a joint review. Before the change implementation, the request is jointly evaluated by Dedicated Instance Product Management and partner.

Emergency changes

Cisco and the partner can undertake emergency changes immediately, or at the next available maintenance window, for the following reasons.

• To restore service to a customer

• To reduce the impact of an outage

• To avoid a potential customer outage

• To remediate a security vulnerability

For emergency changes in the network outside of the Dedicated Instance, the partner notifies Cisco of customer impacts that are visible to Cisco. When reasonably possible, the partner opens a case with Cisco so that Cisco can react to the impact.

When undertaking an emergency change in the Dedicated Instance, Cisco notifies the partner when reasonably possible. The email that identifies any customer impact caused by the emergency change is sent to the communication list.

Incident management

Incident management minimizes adverse effects on business caused by errors in the environment. Cisco analyzes incidents as they occur to quickly identify a cause. Cisco then applies a workaround until a permanent fix can be deployed.

Partners handle Incident Management in their networks according to their own established processes. Partners notify Cisco of activities that can raise alarms, or other notifications that are visible to Cisco.

Cisco follows the Maintenance Window process for applying changes.

Support case classification

The TAC support case severity is set by the partner while opening a support ticket with Cisco, based on the business impact. The partner can request an escalation to a higher severity during the lifecycle of a ticket, based on changing impacts to the business.

The following section serves as guidance for the partner to determine the correct severity level while opening a TAC support ticket.

Support case impact

A TAC Support case is classified according to its impact on the business (size, scope).

Impact is a measure of the business criticality of an Incident, often equal to the extent to which an incident leads to availability of the solution.

Support case urgency

Urgency defines the criticality of the Incident and its impact on the Services or ability for partners to receive the Services.

Support case severity

Severity defines the level of effort expended by Cisco and the partner to resolve the incident.

The Severity level is determined by applying the Impact and Urgency definitions.

Support case severity matrix

Cisco has the ability during Incident triage to change case severity and downgrade the severity of the support ticket, if warranted. The case may be left open for a prescribed period while operational stability is being assessed.

Software support response time objectives

The following section details Cisco’s planned response time to submitted cases based on their severity. Occasionally, the case severity may be adjusted to align with the guidelines above.

Cisco and service level objective

Webex Calling Dedicated Instance provides partners with English technical support 24x7. Partners can submit S3 and S4 issues directly in Cisco Support Case Manager. For S1 and S2 issues, it’s recommended to call the global TAC number 1-800-553-2447.

Cisco’s standard is to meet S3 and S4 severity levels at least 95% of the time, based on the following grid:

Response time is the elapsed time for Cisco to acknowledge a problem of a given severity. If Cisco can’t resolve the issue in the specified interval, Cisco provides a status and an action plan for resolution. Resolution time depends on, qualified person from the partner’s side being available to aid in reproducing and/or isolating the problem, be an incompatibility between Cisco and the partner’s environment. If such an individual can’t be made available, these resolution times may get extended.

If an acceptable status and/or resolution wasn’t accomplished by Cisco in the time frames indicated, partners should escalate to Cisco.

Cisco Options Package (COP) files

Cisco releases COP files to slightly change the way production code runs and provides Cisco a way to deploy software outside of regular software release cycles. If needed, COP files are released at some point after the initial production code is released. The production teams release COP files for high-impact issues and when there’s no available workaround for an issue. In addition to issue fixes, COP files are sometimes released to distribute utilities when upgrading (for example, disk cleanup).

Typically, field notices with fixed issues have an associated COP file. There’s usually a separate COP file for each issue.

Cisco initiated senarios

If Cisco determines that a customer’s Dedicated Instance environment needs a COP file installation, Cisco uses one of the following processes:

1. If the COP file dictates an emergency fix (vulnerability or imminent failure), Cisco uploads the COP file during Cisco’s scheduled maintenance window.

2. In all other cases, the COP installation will be scheduled as a regular maintenance with partner or customer following the regular change management procedure.

Customer initiated scenario

If a customer decides they need a COP file installation (phone firmware, language locale packs, device packs), the customer should initiate the following process:

Create a service request in Control Hub for the specific COP file to be uploaded to the SFTP server in Dedicated Instance, refer Service Request.

COP files are published on Cisco’s software download page:

https://software.cisco.com/download/home

Partner Responsibility

The partner ensures that its network equipment has enough capacity to handle the load and an appropriate amount of forecast growth.

The partner provides the Knowledge Workers and Workspace devices count during the activation of Dedicated Instance (the number provided should be the end state of total number which will be configured in Dedicated Instance). Based on the details provided, Cisco will do the sizing of the UC applications in Dedicated Instance, for more information on UC application sizing refer. The partner manages the provisioning of features and users within the requested capacity.

The partner needs to inform Cisco of the changes, to the number of Knowledge Workers and Workspace devices count provided during activation. Based on the details provided, Cisco will analyze the changes needed for the UC applications and do the necessary changes. For the same, the partner needs to raise a TAC support case with Cisco and work together on a plan for expansion. The partner can configure the features and users only after the extra capacity is added for the customer.

Cisco responsibility

The Dedicated Instance service monitors data center capacity and ensures that its data center equipment has enough capacity to handle the load and an appropriate amount of forecast growth.

Cisco informs the partner of planned expansions or changes to address the capacity growth if those changes affect the customer. The implementation of upgrades and changes follows the change management process.

Release management for Cisco Collaboration Systems Release

When a new Collaboration Systems release becomes available, the previous release (“n-1”) release becomes “n-2” and the current release (“n”) becomes “n-1”.

Shortly after a new Collaboration Systems release is announced, the “n-2” release enters the End-of-Sale period. Any customers that are on this release must upgrade to the latest release. Cisco will assist this effort by informing the partner to start preparing for the upgrade. Cisco and the partner will jointly coordinate a maintenance window according to the customer’s business needs.

Upgrading to the latest Collaboration Systems release is recommended for customers on the n-1 Collaboration Systems release. If a Collaboration Systems release upgrade is required, or if an SU upgrade is required due to new features, consult Cisco to coordinate a maintenance window for the upgrade. If Cisco finds that an SU upgrade is required for stability or performance reasons, Cisco will coordinate with the partner to schedule the upgrade.

Cisco will notify the partner at the successful conclusion of an upgrade.

Partner responsibilities

The partner monitors its network and equipment that are connected to the Cisco Dedicated Instance data center. The partner also monitors its network and equipment that are:

• Used to support the Dedicated Instance service, AND

• Connected to the customer premises.

Partner monitors all partner-managed devices integrated with Dedicated Instance Cloud.

Cisco responsibilities

Webex Calling Dedicated Instance uses industry-leading network tools to monitor the data center network connections between our data center and the partner network and assurance tools to proactively identify and isolate service impairments across our globally dispersed, geo-redundant data centers.

Cisco does not monitor integration services into partner managed devices connected with Dedicated Instance Cloud. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Cisco does not monitor the Dedicated Instance SIP Trunk towards a cluster other than the Dedicated Instance UC Cluster

• Cisco does not monitor the Dedicated Instance CTI Route Points towards a contact center other than a Cisco managed Contact Center Express.