Empowering Control: Production and Developer Support for Self-Managed TimescaleDB

Welcome to a new era of database management, where empowerment and control are at the forefront of our mission. 🚀 Today, we are thrilled to introduce two support offerings for self-managed TimescaleDB: TimescaleDB Production Support and TimescaleDB Developer Support.

We understand that autonomously navigating and managing your database environment is paramount for some users and use cases. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need a helping hand now and then or a trusty sidekick to walk beside you. If you can't use our cloud product but still want the Timescale Support Team in your corner, then this is for 🫵 ! 

Production and Developer Support for TimescaleDB: Beyond Our (Awesome) Community 

Up until now, one of the ways we have helped our users achieve success with their time series and relational data has been through our Slack Community, where many of us here at Timescale work together with other community members on questions and issues. In this fantastic, vibrant community that is open to everyone, we often see many folks working together as well. Plus, we have the Timescale Community Forum.

However, we understand that sometimes this isn’t enough. When you’re self-managing your database, availability and resilience are non-negotiable—the comfort of knowing an experienced support team is available to help 24/7 can be invaluable. With our new support offerings, we will be able to provide the following benefits:

• Priority assistance 
• Faster issue resolution
• Expert guidance 
• 24/7 support availability*
• Operational support (recommendations and issues), including backup-restore, high-availability/replication, failover, connection pooling, and software upgrades of PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB* 
• Annual health check, systems review, and action plan*
• Technical roadmap preview and influence with a Named Product Manager*

* Production only  

In this blog post, we’ll explain these benefits in more detail. But first, a bit of history.

Our new support offerings: Why now?

At Timescale, everything starts and ends with our users. Those who follow us know that we take our users’ feedback seriously and use it to develop new features. 

Near the beginning of 2020, we focused our Support on our customers running on our hosted platforms (Timescale for AWS and GCP/Azure). This focus allowed us to grow and develop our cloud business, but we frequently received requests from self-managed users about accessing our support offerings. That’s when we decided to do what we do best: listen to our community.👂

So, in response to one of the most frequently requested service enhancements, let’s see what’s in it for you with our two new support offerings for self-hosted TimescaleDB. 

TimescaleDB Production Support

If you’re looking for a comprehensive support solution, TimescaleDB Production Support is our recommended option for self-managed TimescaleDB support. It includes proactive and in-depth consultative support from our dedicated Support Team, including data modeling, query optimization, and performance tuning so you and your team can fully optimize your TimescaleDB usage. 

The Timescale Production Support Team takes great pride in closely partnering with customers to quickly provide insight, resolve potential issues, and ensure their success. Check out this article on our hosted database support to learn more about how we operate. We wrote it about our fully managed cloud solution (which includes Support at no extra charge), but you can 100 percent expect the same level of commitment and professionalism from our team while using self-hosted TimescaleDB.

In fact, while scope is a significant difference between the Production and Developer Support options, the response time and severity levels also differ. Production Support includes production-level response times for severity 1 and 2 issues and enables support for critical workloads. 

Production Support includes the following:

• Unlimited support for a customer’s self-managed TimescaleDB usage, features, and functions, including application and production operational support. This support includes the ability to give deep guidance on the TimescaleDB application in either a development or production environment.
• Severity 1 and 2 cases on up to three “production” databases. These severity levels correspond to “down” and “degraded” status, with 24/7 responsiveness. (Replicas of production databases don’t count toward this limit.)
• Severity 3 cases for all databases (development, testing, staging, and production) handled during a customer’s regular business hours. (Unlimited number of development, testing, and staging databases included.)
• Support scoped to a single use case, e.g., all databases covered under single support subscription must be used for the same customer use case.
• Operational support (recommendations and issues) includes backup-restore via pg_dump/pg_restore or PgBackRest high-availability replication and failover via PostgreSQL physical replication and Patroni connection pooling via PgBouncer software upgrades of PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.

• Operational support does not cover other third-party software besides the solutions mentioned above. Such exclusions cover but are not limited to other backup-restore options, other high availability or disaster recovery solutions, messaging queues or extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, and Kubernetes.
• Email access for routine requests to be handled by our Support Team.
• Portal access for high-priority support requests.
• Quarterly technical and business review: one-on-one quarterly review with technical support engineers and product managers.
• Annual health check, systems review, and action plan.
• Technical roadmap preview and influence with a Named Product Manager.
• Up to four Named Contacts authorized to submit tickets and work with our Support Team.
• Up to $1,500-a-month credit for Timescale Cloud Services included at no additional charge.
• No question too large or small for development, best practices, and optimization for Timescale products.

Severity definitions and response times

Depending on the severity of an issue, Production Support customers can rely on the following initial response times. 

*Target response time is the time in which Timescale will make an initial response to your contact. Target response times of severity 3 issues depend on business hours in your selected region: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding weekends and holidays.

TimescaleDB Developer Support

If you’re still testing and validating but are not in full production yet, our Developer Support might be a good option for your team. Like Production Support, TimescaleDB Developer Support includes proactive and in-depth consultative support from our dedicated Support Team, including data modeling, query optimization, and performance tuning, to ensure your team is able to optimize your use of TimescaleDB.

Developer Support is well-suited for development, test, and non-critical workloads or those that otherwise do not require production-level response times. It includes the following:

• Unlimited severity 3 (something isn't working as expected, or you have a general question about your deployment) cases on all databases, only during the customer’s primary business hours
• Unlimited support tickets via email access, limited to application development and not operations
• Support for an unlimited number of databases
• Four Named Contacts (only your Named Contacts can submit support tickets).
• Use of Timescale Cloud Services for up to $500 a month, free of charge as long as you are enrolled in Developer Support

You can only access our Developer Support as part of your self-managed TimescaleDB usage, functions, and features. You can’t use it for any software, hardware, or other elements of your environment that Timescale does not provide. Likewise, we will only provide support services to you and your team (your Named Contacts)—not third parties.

Severity definitions and response times

Let’s get into the most vital question for any developer contacting support services: response times. The target response time of Timescale’s Developer Support is as follows:

*Target response time is the time in which Timescale will make an initial response to your contact. Target response times of severity 3 issues depend on business hours in your selected region: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding weekends and holidays.

A severity level 3 issue is a moderate impact issue, such as a routine request for assistance or advice or an error for which there is limited or no loss or functionality or impact on your operation and for which there is an easy workaround. Timescale will respond to severity level 3 issues within one business day during regular business hours.

What Customers Say About Timescale Support

If you’re still on the fence about paying for support for your self-hosted Timescale database, here’s what our customers have to say about the services we provide:

“The support that we have received from Timescale over the years has been exemplary, and we also have you to thank for the depth of relationship that we enjoy with Timescale today. This is very much the gold standard by which I will judge all future vendor interactions.”

“Support was excellent! Your support engineer left no stone unturned in trying to find a solution to our problem. As usual, your support at Timescale is superb (as well as the DB, of course ;-). Keep up the great work!”

“Fast and useful response from someone who could actually get things done, which was great. If I had known that Support was really that responsive, I could have saved myself a bunch of debugging time and asked for help earlier.”

Try Timescale Support

Besides inflating our egos a tiny bit, reading what our customers say about us is a tremendously rewarding experience that only reinforces our support values and ethics: we stand for personalized development and production support and see every use case as unique. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to data. Every case is a chance to learn and improve.

This realization has led us to reorganize how we work so we don’t just cater to our cloud customers. Now, whether you self-host your database or rely on us to manage it for you, you will have access to best-in-class support provided by the Timescale Support Team.

As always, we’d love to work through your questions together. If you’re a current Timescale user, drop us a line at support@timescale.com. If you’re not yet a Timescale user, you can use it for free for 30 days, no credit card required—and you have full access to our Support Team during your trial.

If you self-host your database and would like to learn more about Production Support and Developer Support for self-managed TimescaleDB, head to the self-managed support page.

We look forward to working with you!