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26 JUNE 2026


Ubuntu Pro Description

21. Managed Services

Managed Services are an add-on to Ubuntu Pro + Infra Support (24/7) or Ubuntu Pro + Support (24/7). When added, Canonical will manage the Environment as described below.

Environments benefiting from Managed Services can be deployed on-premises, in the public cloud, or on a combination of the two. To be eligible for Managed Services, the Environment must be deployed (manually or automatically) or validated by Canonical.

  • The Managed Services team will remotely operate, monitor, and manage the Environment by:
    1. Service continuity
      1. 24/7 Monitoring, excluding security-related monitoring
      2. 24/7 Alerts
      3. Telemetry Dashboards (accessible also to customers)
    2. (Non-security) Incident management
      1. Prevention and recovery of platforms (ie network, power, compute, storage) and services (ie cloud APIs, observability, connectivity) outages
      2. Diagnosis of external service issues (ie firewall, DNSs, proxies)
      3. Root Cause Analysis for S1 incidents
      4. Node crash recovery
    3. Operations
      1. Backup/Restore of control plane services
      2. Patching/Rebooting (cadence)
      3. Packages refreshed (cadence)
      4. Upgrades (with tailored cadence depending on the offer)
      5. Storage and capacity management/warnings
      6. CVEs (High and Critical) patching/mitigation
      7. Compute expansion/contraction/replacement
      8. Storage expansion/contraction/replacement
      9. SSL certificate rotation and updates
      10. Support for OpenStack roles: Admin, Reader, and Member
      11. Permission and authorization
      12. Admin creation and revocation
      13. Performance tuning and diagnostics
    4. Coordination
      1. Weekly meeting (more than a total of 20 nodes)
      2. Monthly as requested by the customer
    5. Ticket-based tracking of cases
    6. Administrative access. Managed Services will provide the customer with access to the following applications and/or services:
      1. The OpenStack or Kubernetes dashboard, API and CLI
        1. Landscape (restricted to read-only access)
        2. Monitoring and logging system (restricted to read-only access)
        3. Only Canonical will have login access to Environment nodes
    7. Environment size. Managed Services will add or remove nodes from the Environment as requested by the customer through a support ticket, provided that the Environment does not go under the Minimum Size Requirement. As all Environment nodes must be covered under the service, additional fees may apply.
    8. OpsConsultancy packages. Managed Services will provide hours of OpsConsultancy required by the customer through a support ticket, provided that the activity the consultancy is required is pertinent with the Environment. The OpsConsulting additional fees apply and will be charged the month after the completion of the consultancy .
    9. For Environments deployed directly from public cloud marketplaces, Customer is responsible for configuring the Environment’s upper and lower node limits at the time of deployment, within the options presented by the marketplace listing. Customer can request to change these limits via Support ticket or, where possible, directly on the marketplace dashboard.
    10. Ubuntu, OpenStack, and Kubernetes upgrades. Managed Services will ensure the customer’s Environment remains on a supported LTS version of Ubuntu and OpenStack and/or Kubernetes
      1. Upgrades will be performed on a per-AZ basis within maintenance windows decided in agreement with Customer.
      2. Downtime should be expected for non-cloud-native workloads that cannot be migrated away from the availability zone undergoing upgrade.
      3. If cloud utilization is very high and spare capacity is below 20%, upgrade risks will need to be carefully evaluated with the customer, potentially causing delays or preventing the project from being undertaken.
      4. For applications deployed directly from public cloud marketplaces, Managed Services will perform upgrades in pre-defined standing maintenance windows. These upgrades will be announced with reasonable notice, and Customer may opt to skip to the next standing maintenance window if required.
      5. Customer may pin its project to a specific version by asking Managed Services to disable the upgrades. Subsequent requests for upgrades will be evaluated.
      6. Managed Services will provide planned upgrades and maintenance Monday to Friday during Canonical working days. Standing maintenance periods may be pre-appointed following mutual agreements with Customer.
      7. Customer may skip upgrades up to three times, after which automated upgrades will be disabled.
    11. Managed Applications. Canonical will manage applications from its managed applications portfolio. Canonical will expose only API and other user-level interfaces of the applications
  • No other operations will be provided by Managed Services unless contractually agreed between Canonical and Customer prior to the Environment’s deployment. The Managed Service does not provide:
    1. For managed Infrastructure:
      1. Managing, monitoring, backup or recovery of the operating system, customer generated data and any applications running within virtual machine instances or Container Instances
      2. Support for the ability to run virtual machine instances using images other than those provided by Canonical
    2. For self-deployed applications on public clouds, Canonical will not provide Managed Services for external or third-party components integrated within the Canonical-operated Environment.
    3. Evaluation and resolution of any incompatibility or malfunction of external components caused by updates to the Environment remains the responsibility of the Customer.
    4. Alternative scheduling of updates or upgrades
    5. Unsupported versions of Ubuntu, OpenStack, Kubernetes, or applications
    6. Adherence to the Customer’s Change Management requirements/regulations without a DSE
    7. Integration with Customer’s ticketing system without a TAM
  • Service conclusion. At the end of the service term, the Managed Service will initiate an operational transfer. Operational transfer includes:
    1. Hand over of all credentials of the hosts, management software, Landscape and Applications to the customer. The continued operation of Landscape is subject to purchase and agreement of appropriate licence terms
    2. Coordination of any applicable training (if purchased)
    3. For self-deployed applications, Managed Services will transfer the access to the environment’s resources exclusively to Customer. This cannot be undone, and future deployments will use the most current component version which may cause incompatibilities with decommissioned Environments.
  • Customer dependencies. Managed Services requires:
    1. Credentials to the Infrastructure being used for the Applications in the case in which such infrastructure is not managed by Canonical (i.e. Managed OpenStack)
    2. Continuous VPN access for Canonical support personnel to the Environment
    3. For self-deployed Environments, continuous access to the Environment’s resources
    4. Utilisation parameters per Node to be kept below the maximum specified in the design document provided by Canonical when the Environment is delivered to the customer
    5. The facility where the Environment is hosted to comply with the minimum required measures to function, including but not limited to, connectivity, sufficient power supply, sufficient cooling system, and physical access control to the Environment
    6. The entire Environment to be covered by Managed Services
  • Minimum size requirement. Managed Services can only be provided for Environments with:
    1. At least 12 deployed nodes for any eligible OpenStack release
      1. At least 9 deployed nodes for any other compatible product
      2. For Environments deployed directly from public cloud marketplaces, there is no minimum size requirement.
  • Uptime service level
    1. The Managed Service includes the following uptime service levels:
      DATA PLANE FOR CUSTOMER WORKLOADS THAT ARE DISTRIBUTED ACROSS TWO REGIONS DATA PLANE FOR CUSTOMER WORKLOADS THAT ARE IN A SINGLE REGION CONTROL PLANE (OPENSTACK/KUBERNETES API, WEB UI AND CLI)
      Uptime 99.9% 99.5% 99%
    2. Data plane includes:
      1. Virtualisation (for workloads that are architected to not depend on a single compute node)
      2. Storage (block & object)
      3. Network for instances
    3. Downtime must be directly attributable to Canonical in order for it to count against the service level and is measured across a 12-month period. Planned maintenance windows and any requests by the customer are not taken into account when calculating uptime. Planned maintenance is carried out as required by Canonical, Monday to Friday during Canonical working days
  • 22. Firefighting Support

    1. Firefighting Support is an add-on to Ubuntu Pro + Infra Support (24/7) or Ubuntu Pro + Support (24/7). When added, Canonical will support the Environment as described below, with all instances in an environment covered at the same support level. All supported products must be within their Ubuntu Pro lifecycle.
    2. Environments benefiting from Firefighting Support can be deployed on-premises, in the public cloud, or on a combination of the two. To be eligible for Firefighting Support, the Environment must be deployed (manually or automatically) or validated by Canonical.
    3. The Firefighting Support Service is (a) a time-bound planned coverage for activities affecting the Supported Products and (b) an incident bridge support service for unplanned Severity 1 incidents. The service is available remotely during the Firefighting Support subscription term.
    4. Reactive scope:
      1. Reactive response is available 24/7. For unplanned Severity 1 incidents, Canonical will join a video session within one hour of Severity 1 activation.
      2. Firefighting Support response can only support one issue at a time, per customer per environment. For other issues, 24/7 support SLAs will apply for an unlimited number of cases.
      3. Issues that in Canonical’s opinion, are caused by Customer negligence, external non-Canonical components or non-validated environments, or any cause outside the mentioned scope of this schedule will not be supported or resolved by Canonical.
      4. Firefighting Support will assist with reactive restoration for the first occurrence of any customer-caused issue. For recurring issues 24/7 support will be offered instead.
      5. Canonical will provide support via video call either until the earlier of: (i) the core functionalities being restored, (ii) until the issue is downgraded to Severity 2, or (iii) 4h video call.
      6. Severity 1 issues that downgrade to Severity 2 due to partial restoration or any other cause or where the 4h video call window has lapsed will continue to be addressed asynchronously, based on the 24/7 support services SLAs.
      7. Issue severity is reported by the Customer, based on an initial agreement with Canonical. Canonical will verify, confirm, or re-establish the severity of every case before providing support.
    5. Planned coverage scope:
      1. 5 hours per calendar quarter of proactive services for every 10 nodes covered – capped at 30 hours per quarter – are included and may be used for discovery sessions, readiness assessment, risk review, capacity planning, runbook validation, rehearsal support, scheduled standby during agreed coverage windows, and post-coverage review.
      2. For planned coverage, Canonical will provide the pre-agreed preparation services and reserve the applicable coverage time window.
      3. During the Firefighting Support subscription term, unused proactive hours may roll over for one subsequent calendar quarter only, after which they expire.
      4. Additional proactive hours or additional planned activities beyond the included allocation may be purchased under a separate Ops Consultancy or successor services package at Canonical’s then-current rates.
      5. Planned coverage:
        1. For each planned activity, Canonical will reserve expert coverage during the agreed coverage window, if booked at least two weeks in advance.
        2. Before the activity window, Canonical may review the Customer’s implementation plan, assess known risks, validate the runbook, and support agreed readiness activities.
        3. During the activity window, Canonical will remain available for live troubleshooting and escalation support related to the Supported Products.
      6. At the Customer’s request and subject to available included hours, Canonical may join a post-activity review, including lessons learned and stabilisation recommendations.
    6. Firefighting Support excludes: (a) ongoing proactive account management, service reviews, or embedded advisory services typically associated with technical account management or designated support engineering services; (b) general IT staff augmentation, software development work, or project delivery work; (c) live support for non-Severity 1 incidents outside the standard support services; (d) 24/7 standby outside agreed planned coverage; or (e) coverage beyond the included proactive hours allocation, unless separately purchased.

    23. OpsConsultancy

    1. OpsConsultancy is an add-on to Managed Services or Firefighting Support offering. When added, Canonical will provide consultancy hours, from remote, for the topics described below.
    2. Architectural changes
      1. Planning or executing changes in network topology
      2. Planning or executing changes to disk layouts
      3. Integrate/Install new applications/agents/software after deployment
      4. Enabling HW offloading or CPU pinning adjustments after deployment
      5. Implement new data replication scenarios after deployment
      6. Addition of any non-standard packages or applications
      7. Migration of the Cloud to alternative Data Centers
      8. Creation of custom dashboards
      9. Permission adjustments (policy changes)
      10. Security Audits other than CVE and CIS scan reports
      11. User permissions changes
      12. Training on Canonical products
      13. Support for custom OpenStack roles
        1. Creation and revocation
        2. Custom permission and authorization
    3. Customer-specific training
      1. Training/coaching on Canonical products
      2. Customer’s specific organizational training
      3. Customer’s specific security training
    4. Only for Firefighting Support customers (all the above plus)
      1. Operational tasks included in the Managed service
      2. Planning or executing of cloud upgrades/reboots/package or charms refresh

    24. Professional Support Services

    1. The Technical Account Manager service (TAM) is an add-on service offering to enhance support where the TAM acts as a strategic coordinator and trusted advisor
      1. Under these services offerings, Canonical will provide a TAM, who will perform the following services:
        1. Act as the primary point of contact for all support requests originating from the customer department for which the TAM is responsible
        2. Coordinate support requests
        3. Provide best-practice advice on platform and configurations covered by the applicable Ubuntu Pro services
        4. Participate in regularly scheduled review calls addressing the customer's operational issues
        5. Organise multi-vendor issue coordination where applicable. When the root cause is identified, the TAM will work with the vendor for that sub-system, working to resolve the case through their normal support process
        6. Manage support escalations and prioritisation in accordance with Canonical's standard support response definitions and customer needs, including internal coordination with product engineering teams to convey customer feedback and feature requests
        7. Attend applicable Canonical internal training and development activities (in-person and remote) to maintain technical breadth and customer-facing effectiveness
      2. The TAM is available to respond to support cases during the TAM’s working hours. Outside of Business Hours, support will be provided per the Ubuntu Pro Support Process
      3. If a TAM is on leave for longer than five consecutive days, Canonical will assign a temporary backup TAM to cover the leave period. Canonical will coordinate with the customer with respect to foreseeable TAM leave
      4. Canonical will hold a quarterly service review meeting with the customer to assess service performance and determine areas of improvement and to review ongoing risks, priorities, and support trends, aligned with Canonical’s latest roadmaps and informed by upcoming product changes
      5. The TAM will visit the customer’s site annually for on-site technical review
    2. Dedicated Support Engineer (DSE) is an add-on service to enhance support, providing a technical specialist for deeper hands-on engagement
      1. Canonical will provide a DSE, who will perform the following services during local Business Hours during the term of service:
        1. Deliver direct technical support within the customer’s operational context. If required, the DSE may track tasks in the customer’s ticketing system
        2. Understand the products utilised in the customer’s Environment that need to be integrated with Canonical’s offerings and assist with those products, to the extent reasonable based on the DSE’s expertise, to ensure the successful usage of offerings from Canonical, working closely with customer engineers on configuration, troubleshooting, and remediation
        3. Provide best-practice advice on platforms and configurations covered by the applicable Ubuntu Pro services, including direct problem-solving and guidance during active incidents
        4. Provide guidance and review plans ahead of significant events in Customer’s platforms, whether driven by changes to the Environment or periods of peak activity
        5. Act as the primary point of contact for all support requests originating from the customer department for which the DSE is responsible, with a focus on day-to-day technical handling and follow-through
        6. Manage support escalations and prioritisation in accordance with Canonical's standard support response definitions and customer needs, including internal coordination with product engineering teams to convey customer feedback and feature requests
        7. Participate in regular review calls addressing the customer's operational issues
        8. Organise multi-vendor issue coordination where applicable. When the root cause is identified, the DSE will work with the vendor for that sub-system, working to resolve the case through their normal support process
        9. Attend applicable Canonical internal training and development activities to maintain depth in the customer’s stack and related technologies
      2. Canonical will hold a quarterly service review meeting with the customer to assess service performance and determine areas of improvement and confirm priorities for the next period of work, aligned with Canonical’s latest roadmaps and informed by upcoming product changes
      3. The DSE is available to respond to support cases during the DSE’s working hours. Outside of Business Hours, support will be provided per the Support Services Process
      4. If a DSE is on leave for longer than five consecutive business days, Canonical will assign a temporary backup DSE to cover the leave period. Canonical will coordinate with the customer with respect to foreseeable DSE leave
      5. The DSE will visit the customer’s site annually for on-site technical review

    25. Embedded Services

    1. With Embedded Services you will receive the engineering support and access to Expanded Security Maintenance. Canonical will provide such technical support to unmodified Ubuntu LTS release images when installed using official sources and within its product life cycle.
    2. Scope
      1. The scope of the service is limited to the appropriate level as listed above.
    3. Engineering Support-only, processes:
      1. You are responsible for resolving all end user issues. Canonical will not be supporting end-users directly. You should utilise the Knowledge Base, Launchpad, and other resources in addition to your own resolution systems to find workarounds or resolutions for any issue prior to opening a support case with Canonical
      2. You will search Launchpad, to ensure that the issue is not already known and being resolved and, if it is, provide suspected bug number to Canonical support as reference. Canonical reserves the right to redirect low-level and untriaged issues to you
      3. You are responsible for specifying how an issue arises and in what sub-system it is taking place. You must provide a repeatable test case that Canonical can recreate on the hardware systems to which Canonical has access
      4. You will work with Canonical to provide any debugging or further testing required. You will provide any technical information as requested to resolve the problem. Failure to provide required information or assistance in gathering such information may result in closure of the case. When the final solution has been provided by Canonical, you are responsible for verifying that it solves the issue

    Definitions

    Applications: Applications supported or managed by Canonical (Managed Applications as described in the Add-ons section, under Managed Services, and at https://ubuntu.com/managed)

    Break-fix Support: request assistance in the event of an incident and answer questions about Supported Packages and products.

    Bug-fix Support: support for reported software bugs in Supported Packages only. This does not include troubleshooting of issues to determine if a bug is present

    Business Hours: 08:00 - 17:00 Monday - Friday local to the customer’s headquarters unless another location is agreed. All times exclude public holidays at the customer’s location.

    Ceph Cluster: a single Ceph installation in a single physical data center and specified by a unique identifier

    Certified Hardware: any Ubuntu-certified hardware identified at https://ubuntu.com/certified running a Canonical-provided Ubuntu image certified for that hardware.

    Charm: a set of scripts compatible with Juju application modelling for the purpose of deploying and configuring relationships between software packages

    Charmed Kubernetes: Kubernetes deployed using Juju and the official Canonical-Kubernetes bundle on bare metal, Ubuntu Guests, or virtual machines

    Covered Architectures:

    architecture/ release 14.04 LTS 16.04 LTS 18.04 LTS 20.04 LTS and newer
    x86 Yes Yes Yes Yes
    arm64 No No Yes Yes
    s390x No No Yes Yes
    power No No Yes Yes
    risc-v No No No Yes

    CVEs (High and Critical): High and Critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures as assessed by the Ubuntu Security Team. More details can be found at https://ubuntu.com/security/cves

    Desktop use case: unlike Ubuntu machines operated in the datacenter or public clouds, desktop use cases require a human interacting through a display and input devices – such as a keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or assistive technology – to run multiple general-purpose applications in a typical workplace environment. Desktop use cases may also involve developer tools such as MicroK8s and Multipass

    Device use case: unlike desktop use cases, device use cases involve hardware with specialized, application-specific purposes that may support multiple users or operate unattended, running a limited set of applications for dedicated functions. May or may not include a monitor. Examples: Gateways, Industrial PCs, Robots, Kiosks, Point of Sale devices, Medical devices.

    Enabled kernel: Kernel version provided as part of Canonical Enablement service, unmodified and supported

    Environment: all machines (or devices) in a private cloud, cluster, fleet, or similar grouping of instances

    End of Life: a date on which an Ubuntu LTS reaches end of Legacy coverage or end of Expanded Security Maintenance if the Legacy add-on is not available

    End of Standard Support: a date (5 years after the Release Date) on which free standard security maintenance service for the Ubuntu Main repository of an Ubuntu LTS expires

    Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM): an additional scope of security patching service delivered by the Ubuntu Security Team as found at https://ubuntu.com/security/esm. It covers fixes to High and Critical CVE for 10 years and could be offered for Ubuntu Main repository, or both Ubuntu Main and Universe repositories, depending on the Ubuntu Pro subscription (infra-only, Apps-only, or the full Ubuntu Pro)

    Infra support: support for the base Ubuntu OS image and a set of open source infrastructure components, such as MAAS, Ceph storage and OpenStack. It also covers Kubernetes, MicroCloud and LXD

    Knowledge Base: the knowledge base is a database of articles for Customer technical operators

    Kubernetes: the container orchestration software known as “Kubernetes” as distributed by Canonical

    Node: a physical node or virtual machine provided to Canonical (or paid for) by the Customer for the purposes of running the environment. Any further machines (whether virtual (VM) or container) created on top of a Node are not themselves considered to be nodes

    OpenStack: the cloud computing software known as “OpenStack” as distributed by Canonical with Ubuntu

    Release date: the general availability release date of an Ubuntu version as found at https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

    Troubleshooting: the process of identifying, diagnosing, and resolving problems or issues that arise when using a software application or infrastructure, in order to ensure its proper functionality

    Ubuntu Archive: official online repositories that store software packages and updates for the Ubuntu operating system

    Ubuntu Core: Ubuntu Core is a version of the Ubuntu operating system designed and engineered for IoT and embedded systems.

    Ubuntu Guest: a virtual machine instance or Container Instance of Ubuntu

    Ubuntu Main: the deb package repository of an Ubuntu identified by Canonical as Ubuntu Main

    Ubuntu Universe: the deb package repository of an Ubuntu identified by Canonical as Ubuntu Universe

    Valid Customisations: configurations made through Horizon or the OpenStack API of the OpenStack Packages. For the avoidance of doubt, valid customisations do not include architectural changes that are not expressly executed or authorised by Canonical. Configuration options set during a Private Cloud Build should be considered critical to the health of the Cloud. Any changes to these may render the cloud unsupported. Requests for changes should be validated by Canonical to ensure continued support

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