- Scope of the Services
- Support Service Options
- Definitions of Incident Severity Levels
- Standard Support
- Silver Support
- Business Hours
- What is covered by PTC’s Support service
- What PTC’s Support Services Do Not Cover
- Support Incident Reporting, Contact Methods
- Required Information on Incidents
- API Support
- Incident Status and Workflow
- Incident and Bug Fixing Policy
- Customization, Feature and Change Requests
- Supported Version of the Software
- Hosting policies
- Appendix Definitions
Do you want to learn?
Before submitting a ticket, we suggest you search the Knowledge Base for advice!
Do you have a problem?
If the Knowledge Base wasn’t helpful in resolving your issue, it’s possible that you’re experiencing a bug. For the shortest response time, submit a ticket by logging in to codebeamer or codebeamer X and using the Service Desk. The severity rating you enter here will define the priority your issue is handled with. Support Services are only available for our customers.
Scope of the Services
PTC provides technical support (Support) for customers which purchased subscription licenses or Support for perpetual licenses from PTC or Intland Software GmbH for the codebeamer or codebeamer X, hereafter referred to as Software in this document). For the avoidance of doubt, “PTC” shall mean the PTC Affiliate specified on the PTC Affiliate document available at https://www.ptc.com/en/documents/legal-agreements/ptc-affiliates , depending on the customer’s country of purchase as specified in said document.
Support Service Options
Options | Standard (only for existing Support and Subscription orders purchased before 1 October 2022) | Gold (formerly called “Silver“) | |
---|---|---|---|
Knowledge Base access | Yes | Yes | |
Online download access to the latest releases and patches, and upgrades | Yes | Yes | |
Customer Service Desk | Yes | Yes | |
Phone | Yes | Yes | |
Live screen sharing | Yes | Yes | |
- | Yes | ||
Number of users able to create incidents | 2 | 4 | |
Support language | English | English / German | |
Support hours | 8×5 | 24×5 | |
Initial Response Time(5) for different Incident Severity Levels | Critical(1) | 8 Business hours | 4 Business hours |
Major(2) | 2 Business days | 1 Business day | |
Medium(3) | 3 Business days | 2 Business days | |
Low(4) | 5 Business days | 5 Business days | |
Information Security Incident Response (ISIR) | See Chapt. Information Security Incident | See Chapt. Information Security Incident | |
Dedicated support | Support Engineer | Senior Support Engineer | |
Advice on installation | Yes | Yes | |
Log analysis | Yes | Yes | |
Upgrade support (via Ticket) | - | Yes | |
Remote assistance | - | Yes | |
API support | - | Yes |
Definitions of Incident Severity Levels
PTC will classify the normal incidents on their Severity Level according to the criteria below. PTC may re-classify Incidents if it believes that the original classification is incorrect. The Response Goal shall not apply if the Incident is caused by third party Software. PTC will not correct any Software Failure caused by modification or enhancement of the Software, or when the Failure is corrected by an existing Software release provided by PTC.
Severity | Definition | Response Goal |
---|---|---|
(1) Critical | The “Production system” is not available, substantially unavailable, or normal business operations are seriously disabled. The incident is preventing productive work on your production system, and it affects users performing a business-critical function. If PTC provides an acceptable workaround, the severity classification will drop to Medium or Low. | PTC will provide a response and begin to analyze the incident and verify the existence of the problem within the Initial Response Time(5) defined period. PTC will use commercially reasonable efforts to resolve Critical Incidents as soon as possible. The resolution will be delivered as a Workaround or Hotfix. If PTC provides an acceptable Workaround or Hotfix for the Incident, the severity classification will drop to Medium or Low. |
(2) Major | The “Production system” is available but the incident has a business-critical impact on your production system; a function or functions are not available or are not working properly, preventing productive work, and affecting people performing a business-critical function. | PTC will provide a response and begin to analyze the Incident and verify the existence of the problem within the Initial Response Time(5) defined period. PTC will use commercially reasonable efforts to resolve Major Incidents as soon as possible or in the next Maintenance Release. If PTC provides an acceptable workaround for the Incident, the severity classification will drop to Medium or Low. |
(3) Medium | The incident has business impact on your “Production system”, but does not prohibit the execution of productive work, or a reasonable workaround is available. | PTC will provide a response and begin to analyze the Incident and verify the existence of the problem within the Initial Response Time(5) defined period. |
(4) Low | The incident is not production-critical, or it is detected on your non-production system. The incident has no impact on the “Production System” performance, quality or functionality and no impact on productive work. | PTC will provide a response to the Incident and verify the existence of the problem within the Initial Response Time(5) defined period. PTC does not guarantee a resolution time for Low Severity incidents. |
Standard Support (only for existing Support and Subscription orders purchased before 1 October 2022)
With Standard Support two members (or more members, but only if this is agreed in writing in advance, depending on the End-User’s selected service package) of your team able to create an unlimited number of incidents on our Customer Service Desk, Standard Support includes support by phone, live screen sharing. Standard Support is available in both German and English, with a dedicated Support Engineer attending to your tickets 8 hours a day (9AM-5PM CET), 5 days a week (Mon-Fri).
Gold Support (formerly called “Silver Support”)
Gold Support includes a wide range of support services. This flexible support plan lets 4 members of your team submit an unlimited number of incidents either using the Customer Service Desk or via e-mail, based on which your team may receive help via phone, e-mail, or live screen sharing over the web. Gold Support is provided in both English and German and includes 24×5 (Mon-Fri) support for critical incidents by our dedicated senior Support Engineers.
Business Hours
PTC’s business hours for Codebeamer are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM CET (GMT +1), Monday through Friday.
General Provisions
Support Services offerings (whether purchased for perpetual licenses or as part of subscription) may not be cancelled by Customer following PTC’s acceptance of an order for such offering.
For all licenses of the same general product category at a particular site or that are supported by a common Customer IT organization, Customers must purchase the same level of Support Package.
PTC is obligated to provide Support Services only during periods for which Customer has paid the applicable fees and only in accordance with the level of Support Services Customer has purchased. The services offered under any Support Services plan may change from time to time, and PTC may cease to offer Support Services Plans at any time without notice, subject only to the obligation to refund to Customer the unused portion of any previously paid applicable fee (on a prorated basis).
If Customer elects Support Services for a product that is licensed on the basis of Registered Users, all of Customer’s licenses of such product must be on Support Services. In addition, if Customer would like to renew Support Services for any products on a PTC Support Sales Order Number (SSON), all products on such SSON must be renewed.
If Customer at any time discontinues Support Services for perpetual licenses, Customer will not be entitled to reactivate Support Services. In such case, Customer may either use the Licensed Products without Support Services or purchase new subscription licenses.
Subject to different terms for particular products set forth below in this document, following shipment of a New Release of a product, only that New Release and the immediately previous release shall remain “current” for support purposes. PTC is not obligated to perform investigation and/or repair of Errors (i) found by PTC to be in other than a current unaltered release of the products; (ii) caused by changes to the Customer’s operating systems, environment, databases or other system components which adversely affect the products; (iii) caused by use of the product in combination or interconnection with software not provided by PTC; (iv) use of the product on a computer, operating system, software or peripherals other than a computer, operating system, software or peripherals for which such product was designed for and licensed for use on; (v) caused by improper or unauthorized use of the products; (vi) due to external causes such as, but not limited to, power failures or electric power surges; or (vii) due to a failure by the Customer to implement recommendations in respect of solutions to Errors previously provided by PTC to Customer. PTC is not obligated to perform any Support Services with respect to modifications or customizations of the products, nor with respect to any developments resulting from Customer’s use, development or customization of functionality contained within the products, all of which are Customer’s sole responsibility.
What is covered by PTC’s Support service?
- Root cause analysis, identifying and troubleshooting incidents
- Assistance on installation incidents
- Guidance on upgrade incidents
- Guidance on PTC’s supported integrations (3rd party integrations are not covered)
- Analysis of SSO, LDAP/AD connection problems
- Incidents are usually resolved in newer releases, thus an upgrade may become necessary to benefit from fixes.
What PTC’s Support Services do not cover?
- Technical Support for end of life versions (see currently supported versions). For a special support contract, please contact our sales team!
- When the software is used on a non-recommended platform or in a non-recommended environment. Recommended platforms and environments are described in the knowledge base.
- Customers without a valid software license, or a valid Support & Maintenance Agreement.
- Beta releases, release candidates, snapshots, and end-of-life releases, and for deprecated features.
- Customized product instances where the original source code was changed or extended.
- Programming-related or development related questions and requests.
- Product education questions.
- Professional services, including:
- Installation and upgrade services (Support helps with advice)
- Docker configuration issues
- Customization
- Performance tuning
- Infrastructural problems, configuration of SSO, OpenID Connect, LDAP/AD configuration, Apache & web server, Proxy and Firewall issues
- Database and clustering configuration
- 3rd party integrations
- Failures caused by software for which PTC is not responsible.
Support Incident Reporting, Contact Methods
The primary means of submitting issues is via Incident Trackers on our Service Desk. Tickets submitted using Incident Trackers are prioritized based on their severity rating defined by the user upon submission. Incidents may be submitted by Authorized Contact(s) only. Authorized Contact(s) must have received training to provide them with sufficient expertise in operating the Software. You can also contact us by emailing support@intland.com, or via phone:
- US phone number: 866-468 5210
- EU phone number (+49) 711-2195-420
Incidents submitted via email or telephone are automatically assigned a low severity rating.
Required Information on Incidents
All incident reports must, if applicable, include the following:
- The Licensee’s “account” which PTC provides to the Licensee on registration.
- The exact Version Number and the Platform that the Software is running.
- Before reporting an Incident, the Licensee must verify that the Incident is reproducible. The Licensee should provide a reproducible Test Case that demonstrates the specific use case causing the Software Failure being reported.
- Log files, screenshots, trace files relevant to the incident.
- The exact wording of all related error messages.
In case of reported Information Security Incidents the following data has to be provided:
- Name of the incident
- Summary of the incident (some evidence has to be provided, for example screen shot, alert notice etc.)
- Categorization
Please note that in this tracker Information Security incidents must be reported exclusively, not any feature request or improvement request can be submitted. If such a feature request or improvement request is included the incidents are going to be closed without further investigation.
Our Gold Support service covers remote upgrades & assistance, API support, a free staging server, and an annual on-site visit to your team by our experienced Support Engineers.
API Support
All incident reports must, if applicable, include the following:
- To analyze incidents reported against Rest- and/or OpenAPI (Swagger), a sample code that demonstrates the problem must be provided.
- API support does not include answering API related development questions.
Incident Status and Workflow
The table below describes PTC’s incident management workflow and the actions performed in various statuses as the incident progresses along the workflow:
Incident Status | Description |
---|---|
New | Every reported incident starts out in this initial status. Generally, only recently submitted incidents will have this status. |
Under Investigation | PTC’s Support Team is analyzing the incident. |
Pending | PTC’s Support Team requires (and waits for) further information about the incident. After receiving the required information, the incident should transition to the status Under Investigation. Items remaining in this status for 30 calendar days will be closed automatically. |
Short-term target | The reason of the incident is identified, and the fix is planned for the next upcoming release. |
Medium-term target | The reason of the incident is identified, and the fix is planned for one of the upcoming releases. |
Long-term target | The reason of the incident is identified, and the fix is planned to be delivered in subsequent future releases later on. |
Resolved | The incident is considered resolved. Items remaining in this status for 30 calendar days will be automatically closed. |
Closed | The incident is closed, no further activity is available. |
Incident and Bug Fixing Policy
PTC Support provides workarounds and advice to resolve specific product incidents:
Bug Fixes
Fixes for non-critical, non-security bugs will be provided by PTC in the next maintenance release, with the conditions that:
- The fix is technically feasible, and
- The fix doesn’t impact the quality or integrity of the Software.
- And the following conditions below.
PTC assesses and prioritizes bugs, and schedules fixes for non-critical incidents based on internal considerations. Factors considered in the analysis and prioritization of bugs include, but are not limited to:
- How many customers are affected by the problem?
- Is there an effective workaround or patch to the incident?
- How difficult is it to fix the incident?
- Whether the fix is already available in a newer release
- Will new already features on our roadmap make the bug obsolete when they’re released?
- Other internal factors within PTC’s judgement.
Hotfixes (Patches)
In special cases, PTC may provide Hotfixes (patches) when:
- the incident’s Severity is classified by PTC as “Critical”, or
- the incident is security-related.
As per our Severity Levels table above, Critical Incidents are defined as incidents that make the “Production system” is unavailable, substantially unavailable, or seriously disable normal business operations. When the incident prevents productive work on your production system and affects users performing a business-critical function, it is considered Critical.
Non-security Hotfixes are only available on a case by case basis as requested by our users. PTC reserves the right to charge for Hotfixes based on custom quotes.
Information Security Incidents Response
Any security events and information security weaknesses should be assessed immediately after the incident/event has been observed, and it should be decided if they are to be classified as information security incidents.
Information security events and weaknesses shall be classified under the below two severity levels:
- Major (Security) Incident
- Normal (Security) Incident
Security incidents need to be reported under the following links:
- codebeamer: https://codebeamer.com/cb/tracker/16949942
- codebeamer X: https://codebeamer-x.com/x/#/tracker/12613106/0
Classification/Severity | Event description | Action | Reaction Time |
---|---|---|---|
1. Major (Security) Incident | - Organization has lost the ability to provide a critical service to a subset (or all) of system users. - Personal or other sensitive data was compromised. |
- Time to recover is long enough, and additional resources are needed. - Escalation, internal and external communication. - Additional resources should be made available. |
4 working hours |
2. Normal (Security) Incident | - The company can still provide all critical services to all users but has lost efficiency. - No personal or other sensitive data was compromised. |
- Time to recover is predictable with existing resources. - Information Security Incident Response Team (ISIRT) can manage the whole incident handling process at its own discretion within a reasonable time frame. |
8 working hours |
Just for clarification: application security vulnerabilities are not considered as security incidents, application vulnerability management is governed by Secure SDLC.
Customization, Feature and Change Requests
PTC provides various extensions, templates, and other customization options with documentation and examples to support the customization of the Software.
Our product managers review Feature and Change Requests on a regular basis, however, we don’t guarantee that we implement or consider to implement such requests.
Supported Version of the Software
Codebeamer Version Lifecycle & End of Life policy
PTC regularly retires older versions of the Software to be able to focus on delivering high quality in upcoming releases. You’ll find the lifecycle details of recent and current Software versions (Codebeamer) below:
Version | Code name | End of Life | Changes |
---|---|---|---|
22.10 LTS | Gina | 31 October 2024 | Release Notes |
22.04 | Felicity | 30 April 2023 | Release Notes |
21.09 LTS | Emma | 30 September 2023 * | Release Notes |
For support questions about older versions, please contact codebeamer-salesteam@ptc.com for a special support contract.
* please contact codebeamer-salesteam@ptc.com for extended End of Life support.
Upgrading Codebeamer
Upgrading to the latest version of Codebeamer is a necessary step to gain access to new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, and other advantages. See the upgrade paths that were tested by PTC below:
Target version | Tested upgrade path from version |
---|---|
22.10 LTS |
|
21.09 LTS |
|
20.11 LTS |
|
9.5 LTS |
|
9.1 |
|
7.9.1 |
|
What are the differences between codebeamer’s LTS and non-LTS versions?
– A Validation Kit is available only for LTS versions
– LTS versions will be maintained for 2 years from the initial release date. For more information please refer to our Version Lifecycle & End of Life policy.
– Non-LTS versions are supported for 1 year from the initial release date. For more information please refer to our Version Lifecycle & End of Life policy.
Codebeamer X (Intland Retina) Version lifecycle & End of Life policy
Find the lifecycle details of recent and current Software versions (Codebeamer X, formerly Intland Retina) below:
Version | End of Life | Changes |
---|---|---|
4.3 | 30 June 2024 | Release Notes |
Upgrading Codebeamer X (Intland Retina)
Upgrading to the latest version of Codebeamer X (formerly Intland Retina) is a necessary step to gain access to new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, and other advantages. See the upgrade paths that were tested by PTC below:
Target version | Tested upgrade path from version |
---|---|
4.x | 2.1 or higher |
3.x | 2.1 or higher |
Hosting policies
Click the policies below for more information on the information security requirements for Azure VMs and AWS EC2 Cloud-hosted instances of Intland Software’s applications:
Appendix: Definitions
a) Production System means the Software that is being used as a regular part of actual day to day business operations.
b) Services refers to the Support Services listed in this document.
c) Version Number is a three-part version number in the form of A.BB.CCC which identifies Releases of Intland products.
d) Incident means bug or failure reported to PTC as a result of a reproducible operational deviation of the Software from the Software specifications.
e) Business Hours are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM CET (GMT +1), Monday through Friday.
f) Workaround means a Hotfix or other method used to avoid Software Failure.
g) Releases of codebeamer refers to any new version of PTC’s codebeamer products that delivers extended functionality, performance and usability improvements, and bug fixes. In some cases, PTC may consolidate features due to global system improvement, resulting in the removal of certain features.
h) LTS – Long term supported release, is numbered with the abbreviation of “LTS”.
i) codebeamer releases on the roadmap or under development are named by English women’ names calendar- eg.: A(lice), B(etty), C(armen), D(orothy), E(mma) etc.- until its finally released and published.
j) codebeamer releases published are identified by the release date – eg. November 2020 is 20.11. For Example: * CB 20.11 LTS***
k) Service Packs are numbered by 1…n and abbreviated as “SP”. Service packs for certain releases are identified as eg.: CB 20.11 LTS – SP1
l) TÜV Validation: versions validated by TÜV Nord and further related information can be found on the Intland webpage under the following link.
m) Releases of codebeamer X refers to any new version of Intland Software’s products that delivers extended functionality, performance and usability improvements, and bug fixes with Angular frontend. In some cases, PTC may consolidate features due to global system improvement, resulting in the removal of certain features.
n) codebeamer X is numbered by 1…n and one decimal 1…n. eg: CB X 4.0, CBX 4.1.
Change in the first number means significant new features or changes in the next release eg. CBX 3.0 to CBX 4.0…4.1.
Change in the first decimal means minor improvements, usability development, bug fixing.