Techstaff SLA

DSI Techstaff Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

The DSI Techstaff team adheres to established guidelines and policies to ensure all user communications are logged, tracked, and handled promptly. By using any equipment or services managed by DSI Techstaff, you agree to the terms outlined below.

Official Communication Channels

All questions, feedback, concerns, or service requests must be submitted through one of the following channels:

• Public Slack channel: Post in the designated DSI Techstaff channel.
• Ticket system: Email techstaff@cs.uchicago.edu to open a ticket.

Please note: Messages sent via Slack DMs, personal email accounts, or text messages will not be monitored or addressed.

Scope of Services

When should you contact the DSI Techstaff team? Currently, we have three levels of priority, from highest (P1) to lowest (P3):

• P1
  • Emergency action is required by DSI Techstaff
    • DSI HPC Cluster is down
• P2
  • The platform is causing an issue in my workflow
    • Core services that the cluster provides having issues, such as SLURM issues, might constitute this
• P3
  • Feedback or feature requests

Please note that these priority levels are determined by DSI Techstaff, not the requestor. While DSI will respond to all tickets within a certain amount of time (see below), the priority of these events may dictate how quickly DSI Techstaff responds afterwards.

If DSI Techstaff determines that a request does not fit into one of these priority levels, the request will be returned to the requestor. DSI Techstaff will not be responsible for work that falls outside the specifications above.

Response Times

DSI Techstaff will acknowledge and respond to your inquiry according to the table below. Response times are measured in business days (Monday–Friday, 9 AM–5 PM CST), excluding paid holidays.

DSI Techstaff Commitments

DSI Techstaff is committed to the continued support, operation, and maintenance of all IT projects and business projects under the Data Science Institute. In short, our services are up and we aim to keep them available to the best of our ability.

DSI Techstaff will announce any maintenance windows or repairs in the public Slack channel and will provide at least one week of notice before the work begins.

During these downtimes, DSI Techstaff will communicate progress updates to the necessary users and stakeholders. Depending on the type of work being done, updates may be as frequent as minute-by-minute or as infrequent as every 30 minutes. The cadence will be determined before the work starts.

DSI Techstaff strives to create a robust system that performs well under stress and fails gracefully. However, we cannot guarantee perfect uptime.

Oversight

The DSI cluster is overseen by DSI Techstaff and the DSI’s cluster oversight faculty committee.