GrC Platform operations

Materna provides a portal for Service Recipients as the preferred point of contact and interaction between SaaS Service Recipients and Materna: Materna Support Portal.

Customers are not required to submit a Support Case to BMC after raising support ticket with Materna as the Materna Support Team will loop in BMC if required and coordinate next steps as needed.

Incident Management

Materna provides the infrastructure, the Service Support Desk (SSD) for operation, monitoring of the infrastructure, incident management and service management. Incidents and service re-quests are reported by a predefined group of people to the Materna SSD or are displayed by the infrastructure monitoring in the SSD and processed there during the agreed service times.

All incidents and service requests are processed using a ticket. The employees in the SSD are trained technicians who can perform an initial error analysis of the ticket opened by the Service Recipient.

In the case of tickets that cannot be resolved immediately, the SSD employees can draw on the expertise of the second-level employees and forward the ticket to them for further processing.

In the event of a P1, production incident, the Materna team will send a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) after an investigation.

First Level Support

The employees in the SSD are trained technicians who assume the function of first-level support and perform an initial fault analysis of the tickets. If the problem of the incident cannot be solved, the ticket will be forwarded to the next support level.

Second Level Support (Administration)

Second level staff performs the following activities:

• Detailed fault diagnosis of incidents
• Repair, troubleshooting
• Database management
• Kubernetes cluster management
• BMC application management
• Installation of software releases and security updates
• Documentation
• Feedback to:
  • First Level Support
  • Customer
  • Management

• Escalation procedure

Third Level Support

Materna commits to the following regulations in the case of third-level support cases and has also agreed these with the manufacturers concerned:

• No or at most anonymised provision of data or log files for the purpose of troubleshooting.
• Cooperation with the manufacturers by means of screen sharing (no access by third parties to systems, system components or data of the customers)

Change Management

Customers can raise and track Standard Service Requests in the Customer Portal.

Examples of Standard Service Requests:

1. Database backup and restore
2. Planned service restarts
3. Deployment of customizations
4. Requesting a copy of the application log files

Service Subscription Changes

All requests to change the BMC Subscription will be processed by Materna within the normal service hours (Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm, except German holidays) and 1 (one) working day after the request by the manufacturer BMC Software. This may include:

1. additionally purchased subscriptions,
2. reduced subscriptions,
3. renewals and
4. new subscriptions

Service Management

This chapter lists details about the Service Manager, formal Service Review Meetings and Service Escalations.

Service Manager

The Service Manager is responsible for meeting and maintaining the service levels agreed upon in the SLA. The main tasks include:

• Central contact person for the customer for the entire service
• Coordination of all service relevant operational issues (SPOC)
• Control and tracking of the agreed SLAs
• Support for the definition and establishment of service and capacity KPIs and their measurability
• Ensures monitoring of the necessary components
• Improvement of monitoring, also after commissioning
• Coordinates the transfer of projects and changes into regular operation
• Takes care of analysis after critical failures and prepares RCA (Root Cause Analysis) in case of such a failure
• SLA report
• Participants in service review meetings (quarterly)
• CSI (Continual Service Improvement)
• Contact person in case of escalations
• Coordination of deployments

Service Review Meetings

The service managers coordinate meetings between the parties on a regular basis or as needed to coordinate, detail, implement, and monitor operational processes. Generally, these service review meetings take place on a quarterly basis. However, the frequency can be agreed individually with the service manager. These meetings aim to discuss and evaluate the achievement of the service levels, service us-age and other such metrics for the past period and to develop measures for service improvement. Another objective is to coordinate the planned activities of the parties involved and capacity planning for the coming period.

Service Monitoring

Materna Operational Monitoring provides tools to keep an overview even in highly complex and agile environments. The objective is to be able to react quickly and efficiently to events jeopardizing a business case.

Materna Operational Monitoring offers flexibility through various plugins and monitoring functionalities. The standard monitoring includes several modules for:

• Monitoring of system resources
• Service monitoring
• Kubernetes infrastructure monitoring
• Application monitoring