Basic information

• Service/Category
  By selecting the correct Service/Category of the issue, you will get our response faster.
• Language
  Select your preferred contact language.
• Contact method
  Refer to [Contact Method (Web, Phone, or Chat)] for details.
   

Severity

• Setting an appropriate Severity is important for smooth resolution.
• Select the Severity according to your business impact. Please refer to [the separate table for definition].
• Adding words like “Urgent” in your Support Case won't escalate the Severity.
• We may ask your approval to lower the Severity depending on the situation.
• If you want to change the Severity, refer to [Escalating the Severity].
  
  

Contact methods (Web, Phone, Chat)

• Customers with Business Support plan or higher have access to Phone and Chat contact methods. While you can choose the contact method that best suits your situation, AWS recommends using Phone or Chat in the following scenarios:
  －For high severity inquiries
  －When requesting to increase the severity level of an existing case
  －To confirm mutual understanding of complex situations
  －To supplement information that is difficult to convey in writing
  －When unsure about what information to provide
• Our support engineers may sometimes suggest a phone conversation.
• Please note that when you contact us via Phone or Chat, we may not be able to provide immediate answers if investigation is required. In such cases, we will propose to provide the response via Web after our investigation. This approach helps us provide answers without keeping you on the line for extended periods.  

Contacting via Phone and/or Chat

• If you subscribe to Business Support plan or higher, you can use Phone and Chat to contact us.
• If you choose Phone, you will receive a phone call from us. Enter your phone number in the Support Center referring to the notes at the page top.
• Please understand that you may not be able to start a conversation immediately when our Phone and/or Chat are busy.
• After a Support Engineer has been assigned to your case, they may not be immediately available if you contact us via Phone or Chat. In such situations, we may suggest either a callback from the assigned engineer or providing a response via Web.
• If you have a deadline for issue resolution, the best practice is to set an appropriate severity level when creating the case and explain the context of the urgency and deadline during the conversation.

Describe the issue you want to solve very clearly

• When you are in a rush, you may tend to write a question like the first example.
• If we could understand your issue clearly, we can speed up the resolution.

• Provide specific information of how you confirmed the issue
• Provide information of the "access source" as shown in the second example (we can check the possibility of route failure).

Share the details of your current situation and your final goal

• Describe your issue in as much detail as possible. If your Support Case is missing important points, we may take time to ask you for more information.
• Then we can investigate various possibilities, such as wrong command syntax, insufficient permissions, and temporary failure of AWS infrastructure, etc.
• We may suggest other possible ways for you to get closer to "your final goal".

Provide resource ID + Region in question

• Please specify the resource by instance ID, not instance Name.

Provide the start time of your issue (with time zone) and the current situation

• Providing the exact time helps us to troubleshoot.
• Note that we can't investigate issues that are too old.

Share your logs and/or screen captures

• If you share a wide range of evidences of your issue, we may reach an early resolution.
• In general, you are responsible for investigation of the OS and Application layers. However, we may ask you to share their logs and/or screen captures for troubleshooting.
• If you create your Support Case with such information attached, we don’t have to ask you to share them. Then we might be able to resolve your issue quickly and efficiently.
• If you can’t attach them due to large file size, tell us and we will provide an alternative way.
• Mask confidential information before sharing.
• If you have changed the log format, tell us how you changed it.
• We may not be able to understand the logs if the applications are proprietary.

Share the steps to reproduce your issue

• We might try to reproduce your issue in our test environment. It is a very effective way of troubleshooting.
• You can help us by providing the minimum steps to reproduce your issue, such as the code, data, configurations, etc.
• Again, remove any confidential information from them.

Let us know if you tried any counteraction before you created the Support Case.

• We may provide various suggestion to solve your issue. This may include the counteraction you have already confirmed ineffective.
  
• To avoid such situations, provide information of what you have already tested.
• As in the second example, tell us why you understood your counteraction was ineffective. By changing parts of it, we may find it works.

1 question to 1 Support Case

• One Support Engineer handles each single Support Case at a time. For independent questions, we recommend creating separate Support Cases so we may be able to handle them efficiently.
  
• Of course, you can put relevant multiple questions in one Support Case. If you are not sure, create Support Cases and put questions as you like. We may propose to split or combine Support Cases.
  
  
  

Don't use context-dependent wording

• Create the Support Case to tell us what issue you are facing in detail and specifically.
  
• Don't use internal terms of your project.
  
• If you need to refer to your past Support Cases, give us the Case IDs as shown in the second example.
  
  

Questions about deleted resources

If you ask about the past events of deleted resource, it may be difficult for us to investigate sufficiently.

Escalate the Severity

• Enterprise Support Plan and Enterprise On-Ramp Support Plan customers can change severity levels themselves after case creation. See Changing the severity level of your support case for instructions. You can also contact AWS Support via phone/chat through original case to request case severity level change
  
• Business Support Plan customers have two options:
  • Contact AWS Support via phone/chat through the original case to request a severity level change
    
  • Create a new support case with higher severity and quote the original Case ID while requesting the change
    
• Developer Support Plan customers must create a new support case with a higher severity level and quote original Case ID while requesting the change

Questions about a service across multiple AWS accounts

• If you see the issue on a service used across multiple accounts, we recommend you to create a Support Case from each account.
  
• We can't investigate the resources of the account other than the account you created the Support Case from. We may ask you to create a Support Case from the other account. Refer to [Questions of resources in other account]
  
• If you can’t find which of the two accounts has the resource(s) causing the issue, we recommend you to create two Support Cases from each account.
   

Questions of resources in other AWS accounts

• We answer questions about the account where you created your Support Case from.
  
• For security purposes, even if the account ID belongs to the same company or the same AWS Organizations, we won’t answer question about any account other than the account you created the Support Case from.
  
• If you accidentally create a Support Case from the wrong account, close the Support Case, sign in to the correct account, then create your new Support Case. Write the same question without any omission.

Question about the cause of a failure of AWS infrastructure

• Failures are unpredictable and unavoidable. Although AWS makes every reasonable effort to analyze and reduce failures, it is difficult to prevent them entirely.
  
• For this reason, AWS recommends "Design For Failure" for all Customers. We also provide monitoring services, service resources, and best practices.
  
• For example, if you find an instability of EC2 infrastructure, you can terminate it and create new EC2. Taking advantage of such AWS feature, you can take action to mitigate your impact easily and quickly.
• AWS doesn’t explain the detailed cause of failures since we think that such disclosure won't essentially contribute to your workaround strategy. Instead, we want to mitigate your business impact by providing the best practices of monitoring and/or possible workarounds to prioritize restoration.

Question about performance indexes

• AWS doesn’t provide performance indexes of each service (except for those published).
  
• Performance depends on your environment and workload. We do not have general information that fits all customer situations.
  
• You can measure performance in your environment with your workload. We believe that such result should be the best suited indexes for your future use. Taking advantage of AWS features, you can easily create your test environment by copying from your production, and delete it after measurement.

Questions about past records of our maintenance

• AWS doesn't provide past records of maintenance.
  
• Maintenance is for all customers to use our Services safely. AWS makes efforts to reduce the impact on you, however, it is impossible to eliminate maintenance with minimum downtime.
• Under critical situations, we might have unavoidable, immediate maintenance, such as security patching. You can't predict future maintenance frequency from past records.

Question about AWS internal architecture

• If you share the background of your questions, we might be able to provide the suitable guidance.
  

• We can't answer questions like the first example, however, if you share the background like in the second example, we might be able to help you efficiently.

Questions about AWS Compliance

• AWS Support can’t answer such questions. Instead, we will guide you to the "AWS Compliance Contact Us" webform.
  
• AWS Sales Team may contact you later.

Proactive notification of bug-fixes of AWS infrastructure

• If we found that you were impacted by the failure of AWS, we will provide you some workarounds and then escalate the incident to our Service Team.
  
• In this case, we can’t guarantee the date of the fix. Also, when the Service Team completes the fix, AWS Support has no way to provide a proactive notice to you.
  
• If you want to confirm that the fix was completed, open a new Support Case to ask. We apologize for the inconvenience but we ask for your cooperation.
  
• If you subscribe to Enterprise Support plan, you can consult with your Technical Account Manager (TAM) to help you.

About AWS Services

• We accept your request for improvement or new features for all AWS Services.
  
• Provide your request in your Support Case. Support Engineers will share them with the Service Team.
  
• We can't guarantee its implementation. Even if it was implemented, we have no way to notify you individually. Still, we believe that sharing your feedback with the Service Team is beneficial for both you and AWS.

About communication quality of Support Engineer

• Provide your evaluation on the quality of our response by selecting the number of stars in the Support Center. Refer to [About Star☆ for each response] for more details.
  
• If you want to provide your feedback on AWS services or AWS itself, do not use the Star☆ rating. You can write your feedback in your Support Case as we said above.

About Star☆ for each response

• You can evaluate the quality of our response with this Star☆ rating. Rate your total impression, considering our technical skill, communication skill, etc.
  
• If you are satisfied with a response, rate Star☆5. If you want us to improve a bit, rate Star ☆4. If you have a very strong complaint, rate Star ☆1. You can change your rating later, just re-click the Star.
  
• We may contact you by email or phone to hear the specific reason of your rating. We would be happy to get your honest opinion to improve our activity.

About the overall quality of our support

• When your Support Case is closed, you will get an email with a feedback link. Please click on it.
  
• Your feedback is important for us to improve the overall quality of AWS Support.
   

All is well that ends well

• If you resolved your issue with our help, update your Support Case to let us know, then close the Case.
  
• If you resolved your issue by yourself, we still recommend updating your Support Case and writing how you resolved it.
  
• Your update would help your colleagues working in the same AWS Account when they face a similar issue.
  
• It would also help us to know whether our suggestion was beneficial for you or missing some technical aspect. Knowing such situations, we can improve our support activities, so please share how you resolved your issue.