Support Notifications
Khoros Support tracks a notification list to always keep you and your team up to date on news about our product as well as specifics for your particular environment. These notification lists are used for: Khoros Communities and/or Care upgrade notifications Maintenance that falls outside of the standard maintenance windows Miscellaneous product updates For notifications of any system-wide availability updates, potential issues with critical third party services (such as Facebook or Twitter) that we learn about, or any other mass outage of our platform, please subscribe directly to status.khoros.com via email or SMS. If you purchased the Gold or Platinum support package and have access to the Case Portal. Please contact Supportany time to update either notification list and ensure members of your team/organization are notified of important updates!Khoros Maintenance Windows
To enhance operational efficiency, we are standardizing our maintenance windows across all products effective May 20th 2024. Studio Self Publish for Community will now remain operational during maintenance hours, for continuous delivery and deployment flexibility. To continuously improve our products and services, Khoros reserves specific, low traffic windows to perform maintenance to your Khoros product. Examples of maintenance that might be performed include (but are not limited to): Version upgrade to the latest release Configuration of requested feature Deployment of a bug patch/fix to existing version All Products Region UTC AMER 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM APAC 04:00 PM - 08:00 PM EMEA 11:00 PM - 03:00 AM (+1 day) For ease of reference, here are the local Pacific times and Indian times for each region: Region Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) Pacific Standard Time (PST) Indian Standard Time (IST) AMER 01:00 AM - 05:00 AM 12:00 AM - 04:00 AM 01:30 PM - 05:30 PM APAC 09:00 AM - 01:00 PM 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM 09:30 PM - 01:30 AM (+1 day) EMEA 04:00 PM - 08:00 PM 03:00 PM - 07:00 PM 04:30 AM - 08:30 AM * Standard = UTC time during Standard time * Daylight = UTC time during Daylight Savings time * You can look up the specific conversion to your timezone * Maintenance windows cannot be customized. Change windows are set times when planned, no downtime changes are permitted. These changes are scheduled and communicated via the release calendar. By adhering to a set schedule, updates become predictable and manageable. These changes have traditionally not fallen under Maintenance Windows as there is no downtime. By providing visibility into Change Windows and prescribing regularly scheduled times and dates we can deploy with confidence and keep customers informed. Service Day UTC EST IST Core Platform Services Mon 12 PM - 5 PM 7 AM - 12 PM 5:30 PM - 10:30 PM CRM Services Mon 10 AM - 3 PM 5 AM - 10 AM 3:30 PM - 8:30 PM Automation and Bot Services Tue 12 PM - 5 PM 7 AM - 12 PM 5:30 PM - 10:30 PM Messaging and Governance Services Tue 12 PM - 5 PM 7 AM - 12 PM 5:30 PM - 10:30 PM Marketing Services Wed 10 AM - 3 PM 5 AM - 10 AM 3:30 PM - 8:30 PM Analytics Services Wed 12 PM - 5 PM 7 AM - 12 PM 5:30 PM - 10:30 PMKhoros Care Downtime & Impacts to Bot Customers
At times, Khoros will perform scheduled maintenance on your Khoros Care instance. You will receive an email notification for the maintenance approximately 3 days beforehand. This email will contain the date, time, and length of the maintenance. Note your specific date and time from the email Khoros maintenance windows are designed so that any downtime maintenance we perform is done during times that are least impactful to your Khoros Care teams and your customers. You should plan for up to an hour of downtime where agents won't be able to sign in to your Khoros Care instance. Review the maintenance windows. For most of our customers, this impact is minimal and potentially completely invisible to your customers. For a very small group of our bot customers, the downtime could translate to an impact to bot interactions if your bot is connected to the Care API to retrieve messages vs. network APIs directly. The former may mean that your customers won't receive messages from your bot during the downtime and won't receive messages afterward unless they re-engage again subsequently. This can also have an impact on the continuation of bot flows that started before the downtime that got interrupted. Those customers may experience a restart of their conversation journey with the bot, such as a bot response that ignores the context the customer already provided. To minimize the disruption now, consider one of these options: Welcome Response message Bot Holding Work Queue Welcome Response message Set a Welcome Response message in Care for the affected bot channels 1 hour before the downtime, informing customers they might experience a disrupted bot journey. This will trigger a Welcome Response as well as starting the bot journey. Don’t forget to disable this new Welcome Response after the downtime. Alternatively, you could update the welcome bot flow directly within Flow, and then remove it after the downtime. Here’s a sample message: "As we make security improvements to our servers, the bot may be impacted over the next couple of hours. If the bot fails to respond to you, please simply re-engage with us after 1 hour to continue the conversation. We apologize for the impact this may have." Bot Holding Work Queue If customers don't re-engage the bot after the downtime, you might have to take conversations out of your bot holding queue and deliver them to agents without waiting for automatic agent handoff by the bot. Follow this guide to achieve this. Note: If you use bots other than Khoros Flow, confirm with your bot provider how a downtime of Khoros Care might affect you. The steps above should also be of value to you. If you have any concerns or questions regarding this, raise them with your Account team. If you don't know who they are, simply ask Maia, our chatbot, on Atlas 'CSM' and they will let you know who you can speak to. Also, don't forget that our Support Team works 24/7/365 in urgent cases.
What is a mid-day restart?
Question What is a mid-day restart? Answer Sometimes we receive configuration change requests where we're required to make the change/s as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until the next maintenance window (see the maintenance window TKB for reference). We usually specify that we can do these out-of-window deployments for a mid-day restart (when we refer to mid-day restarts, this is not limited to 12pm in that timezone, this is anytime outside of the maintenance window). These restarts are usually no different to regular studio pushes where the downtime for the deployment to take effect can be anywhere from 1-15 minutes. However, we also require explicit approval from customers that we can go ahead with scheduling the restart - especially during business hours.Please keep this in mind whenever you need to schedule something urgent. If you have further questions about deployment out-of-window, please contact support and we will promptly address your questions.General Outages & Notifications via status.khoros.com
We've updated the status page to provide more specific and targeted information regarding the topics that you care about.This allows us to also be more proactive in order to provide the necessary details to you, our customers, about what is occurring on our servers, APIs, or functionality within the product lines. It is our goal to continue to improve this communication and we are happy to continue to receive feedback. What's the URL? http://status.khoros.com/ What does this provide? You'll receive an email or SMS about new investigations, monitoring, or resolutions as they occur based on your preferences and selections. It is the best way to be proactively notified about any problems across the Khoros product lines. Who should sign up? Anyone that's interested in keeping up to date about our infrastructure should be signed up. This includes administrators, community moderators, Care supervisors, or even agents who are expected to respond to customers! It is always great to know what is going on with the tools being used and this is the place to get that information. Won't I get spammed? We update this page only for relevant information and you can select the subcategories to be notified about. By default, everything is checked but there may not be any need for you to be notified on Communities API if you're only using Care in your business (even if we think you should use both!).
