Red Hat Support Severity Level Definitions
Opening a support case online can make it easier to share technical data, error messages, and system information with your Red Hat Support representative. Following the online submission with a phone call can reduce response time as well as potential errors in the capture of information.
Red Hat recommends that you follow any Severity 1 and 2 online support case submissions with a phone call to your local support center.
Red Hat Global Support Services uses the following definitions to classify issues:
Severity 1 (urgent)
An issue with a Red Hat Product or Service that is actively causing serious interruptions to your business critical operations. This is an issue requiring immediate attention as there is a significant risk to your business.
Severity 2 (high)
An issue with a Red Hat Product or Service that is partially functional (such as degradation of a service but the service is still available) and actively impacting your business operations. This is an issue on a business critical system requiring accelerated attention.
Severity 3 (medium)
An issue with a Red Hat Product or Service that is currently functioning as expected but you either (1) recently experienced a degradation that you are monitoring or seeking a root cause for or (2) you are seeing indicators of a potential loss of functionality to a business critical system.
Severity 4 (low)
A non-urgent query regarding a Red Hat Product or Service. Typically, a query that does not involve any interruption to your business critical operations.
Severity of a case can be changed based on the impact on the business critical operations.
Example : A case that is opened as a Severity 3 when a user is observing a worrying but non-critical issue can be changed to a Severity 1 by either Red Hat or the user who reported the issue if it develops into a critical outage.
For a PDF version of this information please download our Red Hat Support severity level definitions.
