What Severity to Choose When Opening a Support Case with AWS for a Degraded Production Application

Answer: B.

Option A is incorrect.

Choose System Impaired when Non-critical functions of your application are behaving abnormally or you have a time-sensitive development question.

In the given scenario, the application is a production application.

Refer to the table “Choosing a severity” in the link below for more details.

Option B is correct.

Important functions of production application are impaired/degraded.

Since the support engineer has an AWS account with a Business plan, he/she can open a case with AWS with this severity selected.

Refer to the table “Choosing a severity” in the link below for more details.

Option C is incorrect.

In this scenario, the business is not significantly impacted because important functions of the application are available.

However, the performance is degraded.

Refer to the table “Choosing a severity” in the link below for more details.

Option D is incorrect.

This option should be selected when the business is at risk and the application's critical functions aren't available.

Refer to the table “Choosing a severity” in the link below for more details.

References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/case-management.html#choosing-severity

When opening a support case with AWS, the severity level chosen will determine the priority of the case and the expected response time from AWS support.

In this scenario, the important functions of the production application are degraded, which means that the production system is still functioning, but not at optimal levels.

Here are the definitions of each severity level and their corresponding response times:

A. System impaired - This severity level should be chosen when the issue is causing a partial loss of functionality or performance degradation in a non-production environment. The expected initial response time is within 12 hours.

B. Production system impaired - This severity level should be chosen when the issue is causing a partial loss of functionality or performance degradation in a production environment. The expected initial response time is within 4 hours.

C. Production system down - This severity level should be chosen when the issue is causing a complete loss of functionality in a production environment. The expected initial response time is within 1 hour.

D. Business-critical - This severity level should be chosen when the issue is causing a significant impact on critical business operations in a production environment. The expected initial response time is within 15 minutes.

Based on the scenario given, it is not clear whether the important functions of the production application being degraded are causing a complete loss of functionality or just a partial loss of functionality. However, since the support engineer has a Business-level AWS Support plan, it is reasonable to assume that the production application is critical to their business. Therefore, the support engineer should choose severity level D, Business-critical, to ensure the fastest possible response time from AWS support.