Note
- The terms of GitHub Premium Support are subject to change without notice and are effective as of November 2021.
- When you use GitHub's support offerings, the terms of your Agreement, the GitHub Privacy Statement, and the GitHub Data Protection Agreement apply. By Agreement, we mean your main agreement with us — i.e. the GitHub Corporate Terms of Service, the GitHub Customer Agreement, or your Microsoft volume licensing agreement.
About GitHub Premium Support
In addition to all of the benefits of GitHub Enterprise Support, GitHub Enterprise customers can purchase GitHub Premium Support, which offers:
- Written support, in English, through our support portal 24 hours per day, 7 days per week
- Phone support via callback request, in English, through our support portal 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (when required for ticket resolution)
- A Service Level Agreement (SLA) with guaranteed initial response times
- Escalation and incident management
- Support Engineers, for Premium customers, and Customer Reliability Engineers (CREs), for Premium Plus customers, have direct access to escalation engineering resources, if needed to expedite case resolution
- Available incident coordinator to manage technical resources within GitHub until underlying issue is mitigated or fully resolved
- Access to premium content
- Health checks
- Crisis prevention: Guided incident simulations that help you prepare for—and experience—an incident without risk. (Premium Plus plan / GitHub Engineering Direct only)
- Application upgrade assistance: Before your upgrade, we review your upgrade plans, playbooks, and other documentation and answer questions specific to your environment (Premium Plus plan / GitHub Engineering Direct only)
- Technical advisory hours (Premium Plus plan / GitHub Engineering Direct only)
GitHub Premium Support plans
There are two GitHub Premium Support plans: Premium and Premium Plus / GitHub Engineering Direct.
| Premium plan | Premium Plus plan / GitHub Engineering Direct | |
|---|---|---|
| Hours of operation | 24 x 7 | 24 x 7 |
| Initial response time |
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| Support channels |
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| Training | Access to premium content |
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| Members with support entitlements | 20 | 40 |
| Resources | Priority ticket handling |
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| Escalation management | For high and urgent priority tickets | For High and Urgent priority tickets |
| Incident management | None | For urgent priority tickets, as needed |
| Health checks | Unlimited automated health check reports (see Generating a health check for your enterprise) |
|
| Crisis prevention | None | Yearly participation in guided incident simulations to help you be prepared |
| Technical advisory hours | None | 12 hours per quarter |
| Application upgrade assistance | None | By request |
| Cloud planning | None | By request |
Note
Enterprise owners and billing managers automatically have a support entitlement. Enterprise owners can add support entitlements to members of organizations owned by their enterprise account. For more information, see Managing support entitlements for your enterprise.
Billing for GitHub Premium Support
How you are charged for GitHub Premium Support will depend on your GitHub products and how you are charged for them.
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If you are a licensed billing customer, the support fee percentage is applied to the cost of licenses for the current year.
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If you are a metered billing customer, the support fee percentage for Premium plan, Premium Plus plan, and GitHub Engineering Direct is calculated as either a percentage of your estimated metered spending or a set minimum annual fee—whichever amount is higher. For GitHub Engineering Direct customers, this is in addition to the Unified Support contract fee.
The support fee for metered billing is estimated from the previous 12 months' spending. If you have less than 12 months of spending history, GitHub will take a 12-month run rate based on your spending history. If your last 3 to 6 months spending is vastly different to the last 6 to 9 months, the last 3 to 6 month period will be used.
If you are switching from licensed billing to metered billing, your support fee at contract renewal is estimated based on the previous year's purchased licenses. Minimum thresholds remain in place.
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If you are both a licensed and metered billing customer (hybrid), your charge will be calculated from the support fee percentage applied to the current year's license purchases plus the support fee percentage applied to your estimated metered billing spend.
New GitHub customers who are only planning to use metered products will be required to pay the annual minimum for Premium plan or Premium Plus plan / GitHub Engineering Direct.
If you would like a quote for GitHub Premium Support, contact GitHub's Sales team.
Signing up for GitHub Premium Support
To sign up for GitHub Premium Support or upgrade your plan, contact our account management team.
Scope of support
If your support request is outside of the scope of what our team can help you with, we may recommend next steps to resolve your issue outside of GitHub Support. Your support request is possibly out of GitHub Support's scope if the request is primarily about:
- Third party integrations, such as Jira
- Enterprise Cloud Importer (available only with expert-led migrations)
- Hardware setup
- CI/CD, such as Jenkins
- Writing scripts
- Configuration of external authentication systems, such as SAML identity providers
- Open source projects
- Writing or debugging new queries for CodeQL
- Cloud provider configurations, such as virtual network setup, custom firewall, or proxy rules.
- Container orchestration, such as Kubernetes setup, networking, etc.
- Detailed assistance with workflows and data management
- Beta features. Support for beta features is out of GitHub Support's scope. For support with beta features, you can contact your account manager on GitHub's Sales team.
For detailed assistance with workflows and data management, consult GitHub Expert Services, which offer specialized support to help you optimize your use of the platform.
If you're uncertain if the issue is out of scope, open a ticket and we're happy to help you determine the best way to proceed.
Contacting GitHub Premium Support
GitHub Premium Support customers can use the GitHub Support portal to report issues in writing, in English.
Hours of operation
GitHub Premium Support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. If you purchased GitHub Premium Support prior to September 17, 2018, support is limited during holidays. For more information on holidays GitHub Premium Support observes, see the holiday schedule at About GitHub Support.
Service Level Agreement response times
For tickets you submit, support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. The initial response time guaranteed by the SLA is dependent on the priority level of the ticket. Response time begins when GitHub Premium Support sets the priority level of the ticket. A response does not mean the issue has been resolved.
| Ticket priority level | Initial response time |
|---|---|
| Urgent | 30 minutes |
| High | 4 hours |
During the initial response time for Urgent priority tickets, you can expect us to do the following:
- The paged Support Engineer or CRE assigns and carefully reviews your ticket. The goal is to understand the issue, start troubleshooting, and identify next steps.
- In the initial response, the assigned Support Engineer or CRE will acknowledge ticket receipt and assignment as well as provide next steps to clarify and troubleshoot the situation. To assist with resolving your issue, the Support Engineer or CRE may ask for additional information such as screenshots, error messages, log files, diagnostics files, support bundles, or the output of specific console commands.
- Depending on the issue, the assigned Support Engineer or CRE may collaborate with others in Support, Engineering, or the regional incident commander.
- If a callback was requested upon opening the Urgent ticket, the assigned Support Engineer or CRE will determine if, at the current time, screen sharing is the most efficient way of driving the ticket towards resolution. If so, they will extend an offer to you to join a screen sharing session.
Installing GitHub Enterprise Server releases
To ensure that your GitHub Enterprise Server instance is stable, you must install and implement GitHub Enterprise Server releases. Installing GitHub Enterprise Server releases ensures that you have the latest features, modifications, and enhancements as well as any updates to features, code corrections, patches or other general updates and fixes to GitHub Enterprise Server.
You must install the minimum supported version of GitHub Enterprise Server pursuant to the Supported Releases section of your applicable license agreement within 90 days of placing an order for GitHub Premium Support.
Assigning a priority to a support ticket
When you contact GitHub Premium Support, you can choose one of four priorities for the ticket: Urgent, High, Normal, or Low. For more information, see About ticket priority.
Resolving and closing support tickets
GitHub Premium Support may consider a ticket solved after providing an explanation, recommendation, usage instructions, workaround instructions, or by advising you of an available GitHub Enterprise Server release that addresses the issue.
If you use a custom or unsupported plug-in, module, or custom code, GitHub Premium Support may ask you to remove the unsupported plug-in, module, or code while attempting to resolve the issue. If the problem is fixed when the unsupported plug-in, module, or custom code is removed, GitHub Premium Support may consider the ticket solved.
GitHub Premium Support may close a ticket if the ticket is outside the scope of support or if multiple attempts to contact you have gone unanswered. If GitHub Premium Support closes a ticket due to lack of response, you can request that GitHub Premium Support reopen the ticket.
Receiving credits for missed responses to support tickets
If you are on the Premium or Premium Plus support plan, and you don't receive an initial response within the guaranteed response time to more than four tickets in a given quarter based on GitHub's fiscal year, you're eligible for a credit. To honor the SLA, GitHub will refund 20% of the quarterly GitHub Premium Support fee. To receive the refund, you must submit a credit request.
The credit request must be made within 30 days of the end of the quarter during which GitHub Premium Support did not respond to your tickets within the designated response time. Credit requests will not be honored if the respective deadline has passed. Once the respective deadline passes, you have waived the ability to claim a refund for the qualified credit. Credit requests may take the form of a refund or credit to your account, cannot be exchanged into a cash amount, require you to have paid any outstanding invoices, and expire upon termination of your agreement with GitHub.
To receive a refund, you must submit a completed credit request to supportcredits@github.com. To be eligible, the credit request must:
- Be sent from an email address associated with your account on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance
- Be received by GitHub by the end of the 30th day after the quarter in which the four qualifying credits occurred
- Include "Credit Request" in the subject line
The following information must be included in your credit request:
- Date (The date must be within 30 days after the quarter based on GitHub’s fiscal year end in which the claims occurred [January 31, April 30, July 31, or October 31].)
- Customer contact (You must specify both name and email address.)
- Customer address
- Qualifying credits (You must provide the date of each qualifying credit and the associated ticket number.)
- Ticket numbers
Accessing premium content
You can access premium content by signing into the GitHub Support portal, then clicking Premium.