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Pinecone Technical Support Policy and Service Level Agreement

Jul 26, 2024

The Pinecone Technical Support Policy and Service Level Agreement reflected below are being replaced and superseded as follows:

If an existing customer has entered into a separately executed agreement with Pinecone governing Pinecone's provision of support and/or service levels, that agreement will not be affected by these updates.



This Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) describes the terms under which Pinecone Systems, Inc. (“Pinecone”) provides technical support for its Platform to customers that have purchased access to the Pinecone Platform pursuant to any agreement providing for access to the Platform between Pinecone and customer (“Customer”) that references this SLA (the “Agreement”). This SLA will apply only to the extent expressly set forth in the Agreement. All support and other services provided under this SLA are subject to the terms and conditions of the Agreement. Any capitalized terms used but not defined herein will have the meanings prescribed to them in the Agreement.

1. Definitions.

Applicable Monthly Service Fees” means the total consumption fees paid by Customer for the Platform during the calendar month in which Service Downtime occurred.

Business Days” means Monday through Friday, excluding US Federal Holidays.

Business Hours” means 8am to 8pm Eastern US Time on Business Days.

Initial Response” means an initial response to a Support Request, which, at a minimum, is made by a human agent and acknowledges receipt of the request.

Issue” means a failure of the Service to conform to the specifications set forth in the Documentation.

Monthly Uptime Percentage” means with respect to any particular calendar month, the total number of minutes in that month, minus the number of minutes of measured Service Downtime during that month, divided by the total number of minutes in that month. Monthly Uptime Percentage is calculated as:

Monthly Uptime Percentage = total number of minutes in a month - Service Downtime / total number of minutes in that month

When calculating the Monthly Uptime Percentage for any month in which the Platform is deployed for only part of the month, it is assumed that there was no Service Downtime during the portion of the month in which the Platform was not deployed.

Production Index" means an environment serving your end users or customers.

Service Credit” is the percentage of the Applicable Monthly Service Fees to be credited to Customer if Pinecone approves Customer’s claim, as set forth in Section 3.1.

Service Downtime” is measured at each Pinecone index as the total number of full minutes, outside of scheduled downtime for maintenance and upgrades, where continuous attempts to establish a connection within the minute fail as reflected in minute-by-minute logs.

Service Hours” means twenty-four (24) hours per day, seven (7) days per week, including US Federal Holidays

2. Service levels.

Availability. Pinecone will undertake commercially reasonable measures to ensure that the Monthly Uptime Percentage equals or exceeds 99.9% during each calendar month (the “Service Standard”). To achieve the Monthly Uptime standard, you must maintain at least two replicas of your index.

3. Remedy.

3.1 - Service Credits. If Pinecone does not achieve and maintain the Monthly Uptime Percentages set forth in the table below, then Customer may be eligible for Service Credits according to the following table:

MONTHLY UPTIME PERCENTAGESERVICE CREDIT
Less than 99.9% and equal or greater than 99.0%10% of Applicable Monthly Service Fees
Less than 99.0% and equal or greater than 95.0%25% of Applicable Monthly Service Fees
Less than 95.0%50% of Applicable Monthly Service Fees

3.2 - Customer Obligations. As a condition to Pinecone’s obligation to provide Service Credits to Customer, Customer must meet all the following criteria:

(a) Have a qualifying index on the Enterprise tier or above, maintained with at least two replicas of that index, throughout the eligible month.

(b) Log a support ticket with Pinecone within sixty (60) minutes of the start of a Service Downtime.

(c) Submit a claim with this request form by the end of the calendar month immediately following the month in which Downtime with occurred, with all the following required information:

  1. The words “Pinecone: Request for SLA Credit” in the subject line;
  2. A detailed description of the events resulting in Service Downtime, including Customer’s request logs that document the errors and corroborate Customer’s claimed outage (with any confidential or sensitive information in the logs removed or replaced with asterisks);
  3. The index name, number of pods, number of replicas, the cloud provider, and the cloud region of the affected Pinecone index;
  4. A description of your affected customers or end users;
  5. Information regarding the dates, time and duration of the Service Downtime;
  6. Descriptions of Customer’s attempts to resolve the Service Downtime at the time of occurrence.

(d) Reasonably assist Pinecone in investigating the cause of the Service Downtime and processing the claim.

(e) Customer must comply with the Pinecone Services Agreement, applicable Pinecone documentation and any advice from Pinecone’s support team.

If Pinecone determines that Customer has satisfied the customer obligations above and that none of the below limitations apply to Customer’s claim, Pinecone will grant Customer a Service Credit. Pinecone will apply any Service Credit to a future invoice or payment for the Pinecone Platform. Service Credits will not entitle you to any cash refund or other payment from Pinecone.

Customer’s rights under this Section 3 (Remedy) are Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy with respect to any Service Downtime or any failure by Pinecone to meet the Service Standard required by Section 2.1 (Availability).

4. Exclusions.

Service Downtime excludes, and Customer will not be eligible for a Service Credit for, any performance or availability issue that results from:

4.1 - A Force Majeure Event, a network or device failure at Customer’s site or between Customer’s site and the Pinecone Platform, or any other factors outside of Pinecone’s reasonable control;

4.2 - Services, hardware, or software provided by a third party, such as cloud platform services (e.g., AWS, GCP) on which the Pinecone Platform runs;

4.3 - Customer’s failure to timely pay Service Fees owed and due to Pinecone for use of the Services;

4.4 - Customer’s failure to be in full compliance with the terms of the Agreement with Pinecone for use of the Services, as well as applicable Pinecone documentation, best practices, and advice from the Pinecone support team; or Customer’s or any third party’s (a) improper use, scaling or configuration of the Pinecone Platform, (b) attempts at modifications to the Pinecone Platform, or (c) failure to follow appropriate security practices;

4.5 - Impact to your ability to access or use the Pinecone console, an interface provided to manage services, is excluded. This includes any component and content linked from the Pinecone console, including Documentation, the Customer Support portal, and Monitoring. These components operate independently from database services and do not impact database availability;

4.6 - Pinecone’s beta services.

5. Pinecone Technical Support Policy.

This Pinecone Technical Support Policy (“Policy”).

5.1 - Generally, technical support is intended to cover the provision of support to Customer’s authorized support contacts for technical issues with the Pinecone Platform that are not covered in the Pinecone documentation.

5.2 - Technical support does not include, and Pinecone will not be required to provide any assistance related to: (a) use of the Platform other than in accordance with the documentation; (b) use of the Platform in violation of the Agreement; (c) issues that result from a Force Majeure Event or any other factors beyond Pinecone’s reasonable control; (d) the integration or communication of Customer systems with the Pinecone Platform or Services.

5.3 - Severity Levels and Response Time:

Pinecone offers three levels of support policies - Starter, Standard and Enterprise. Each policy is defined by its own Uptime Credit, contact method, support hours, number of allowed customer representatives and the Initial Response time, according to the following table:

StarterStandardEnterprise
Uptime CreditsN/AN/AProduction Indexes are entitled to service credits as detailed in Section 3.1.
Contact MethodCommunity ForumSupport PortalSupport Portal, Email
Support HoursN/A
  • Sev 1-4: Business Hours
  • Sev 1-2: Service Hours
  • Sev 3-4: Business Hours
Initial Response Times*N/A
  • Sev 1: 4 Business Hours
  • Sev 2-3: 8 Business Hours
  • Sev 4: 16 Business Hours
  • Sev 1: 1 Service Hour
  • Sev 2: 4 Service Hours
  • Sev 3: 8 Business Hours
  • Sev 4: 16 Business Hours

*For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in these initial response times or in this Support Policy guarantees full resolution of a reported Issue.

Severity Level Definitions

  • Sev 1: Production Index is down or is severely impacted such that routine operation is impossible, with no workaround available.
  • Sev 2: Production Index Issue where system is functional but offers service in degraded or restricted capacity.
  • Sev 3: Production Index has minor impact or has Issue in development, but Customer can still access and use most functionality of the Service, or situation may be temporarily circumvented using an available workaround.
  • Sev 4: No production impact, questions or requests for features.

5.4 - Support Requests. Pinecone will provide 24x7, 365 days support For Sev 1 and Sev 2 requests under Enterprise Support. All other requests will be responded to during Business Hours. Pinecone provides a variety of ways for Customer to request help or otherwise make inquiries, including:

  • Support Portal: an online support module that may be used to report and track issues. Pinecone requests that Customer use this system as the first method of reporting issues and requesting support. It can be accessed through the url https://support.pinecone.io/ or via the Pinecone console by clicking ‘Help Desk’.
  • Email: the online support may also be accessed via the email support@pinecone.io. However, requests received via email will be assumed to be Sev 4 at time of creation.

Support Requests should include the following information:

  1. A description of the Issue you are experiencing, sufficiently detailed to allow Pinecone Support to effectively assess the Issue, including index name, and any relevant error message, and assumed Severity Level in accordance with the Support Definitions.
  2. Information regarding the time and duration of the issue.
  3. Descriptions of Customer’s attempts to resolve the issue at the time of occurrence.
  4. Give Pinecone any other important Support Case information in a timely manner.

5.5 - Measurement. Support Services response times are measured by Pinecone from the time the Support Request is received by Pinecone via the contact methods above.

5.6 - While Pinecone will make commercially reasonable efforts to correct defects or other errors in the Platform and respond to reported incidents of Service Downtime in accordance with Pinecone’s policies and procedures for correcting verified, reproducible errors in the Platform, Customer acknowledges that it may not be possible for Pinecone to correct every or any defect, error, or problem reported by Customer or of which Pinecone is otherwise made aware.

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