BMC Helix Control-M Availability policy

BMC commits to a specific service level agreement (SLA) for availability for its services, with penalties if the agreement is breached. The target availability SLA for Helix Control-M is 99.95% for production environments and 99.9% for non-production environments.

Availability is a percentage of total service time, such as 99.95 percent, and is calculated by using the following formula:

Availability = (Service Time – Excluded Downtime – Non-excluded Downtime) x 100
                                                (Service Time – Excluded Downtime)

The values in the formula are defined as follows:

  • Service Time: total minutes for a particular calendar month
  • Excluded Downtime: all downtime that is scheduled or mutually agreed-upon for the purpose of performing routine, non-emergency, or emergency maintenance on the services (this includes rolling restarts required on the servers that may temporarily affect user sessions or require the user to re-login), or that occurs on non-production systems. Excluded Downtime also includes downtime that is caused by factors outside the reasonable control of BMC, including, but not limited to, customer-managed performance or automated functional testing.
  • Non-excluded Downtime: all downtime that is not Excluded Downtime
Example calculation:

For the month of June, the service time is 720 hours (43,200 minutes). During that month there were 2 hours (120 minutes) of planned maintenance performed on the service. There was an additional 15 minutes of unplanned downtime that was not due to any of the factors listed in Excluded Downtime.

Availability is calculated as follows:

Availability = (43200 – 120 – 15) x 100 = 99.97%
                                 (43200 – 120)

In this example, the service level was met.

In the case of unscheduled production downtime as defined below, BMC provides a Major Incident Report document as described in the BMC-Helix-Control-M-Incident-Response-policy.

In the event of any production downtime (scheduled or unscheduled), the customer will be notified as defined in the BMC-Helix-Notification-policy.

Production Downtime definition

The BMC availability policy defines production downtime as any of the following unscheduled events occurring on a production instance:

  • Full downtime of the Helix Control-M tenant 
  • Inability to login and perform work within a Helix Control-M instance for the majority of the user population where not caused by network or customer issues
  • Performance of a Helix Control-M tenant is impaired to the point of being non-usable and where the issue is deemed to be within the direct control of BMC and a workaround is not available

Customer customizations causing downtime

The following issues are also considered Excluded Downtime:

  • Any issue caused anywhere in the application based on customer customizations
  • Any issue caused anywhere in the application based on customer integrations 

Requesting a service credit

To receive a service credit, you must submit a request by sending an e-mail message to SLArequest@bmc.com.  To be eligible, the credit request must (i) include your support contract ID in the subject of the e-mail message; (ii) include, in the body of the e-mail, the dates and times of each incident of Non-excluded Downtime that you claim to have experienced; (iii) if available, include your server request logs that document the Non-excluded Downtime (any confidential or sensitive information in these logs should be removed or replaced with asterisks); and (iv) be received by BMC within 30 days after the end of the month in which the downtime occurred.

Consult your subscription agreement for any additional SLA terms.

 

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