Here at ClickHouse, we've built a Support Services organization that is built on the key principles of our ClickHouse software. We call it "Support Services" or colloquially "S2", because we've hired and developed a single team that provides all of Support, Chat, Community, Learning, Consultative Support, and Professional Services - the objective across all of these methods is to share our knowledge with our users and customers of both ClickHouse open-source and Cloud. Our common goal is to help you get your results quickly and fully - near real-time - according to ClickHouse best practices.
As part of the founding team here at ClickHouse, our VP of Support Services, Thom O’Connor, sought to solve some long-standing problems he had seen in the technical industry with his many years of open-source Support, Services, and Training experience. We believe we have addressed these problems, with our friend James at PostHog validating his experience working with our Support organization:
"Your Cloud Support has set the bar for any cloud provider support. It’s top notch and has been super helpful"
Thank you, James—it’s a pleasure to work with exciting projects like yours!
From POC to Production
One of these problems has been the chasm in experience that many users and customers have between their evaluation and pre-sales phase of the journey to that of their post-sales experience. In the Cloud world, this journey must be seamless, and the ClickHouse S2 team is there with you when you first start your Trial, to when you go into Production, to your future growth and innovation needs, to then recursively starting again with a new use case.Open and Accessible Knowledge
The second major challenge we looked to address was to get away from the legacy approach of putting our knowledge tools behind paywalls. Instead, here at ClickHouse - whether you are just starting a trial or have been working with ClickHouse Cloud for years - you have access to all of our knowledge. Whether via support cases, our Cloud Chat UI, our free on-demand and live training, docs, community channels, and even consultative assistance - the ClickHouse S2 team is there to help. The single goal for all our teams here at ClickHouse is that our users can begin using our products easily, quickly, largely self-service, and yet with an accessible and friendly support organization there to help when you get stuck.
We offer Support to all users of our Cloud platform, whether you're doing a 30-day free trial or running in production in ClickHouse Cloud, under the core tenet that our Cloud software should be simple to use and get started. Through the ClickHouse Academy, we provide our training for free for all of our users and customers, with only a ClickHouse Cloud account required to login and enroll in our courses (no obligation to create a service). You'll often meet some of our S2 team members virtually if you join any of our live virtual training events - we enjoy answering your questions! (even the hard ones…sometimes mostly the hard ones). We engage with you in the community because we want you to be successful using our open-source software, and are excited to be part of a community that enjoys helping one another and sharing great ideas.
Advocate for users
Another key role for the team is to advocate for our users and customers with our ClickHouse Product and Engineering teams. We pride ourselves on understanding how you use our products and to provide those insights into our future product roadmap. We don't want to have to grow the S2 team endlessly to handle an infinite number of cases! We want our product, documentation, and training to make our products easy and reliable for you to use, so that you don't need to open support cases except when you need additional help.
This allows us to similarly recognize where our Docs may not fully capture the right examples for what you're trying to do. As a result our S2 has contributed significantly to the User Guides of our ClickHouse Documentation. We want to share our tips and advice on how we would recommend optimizing or saving costs in ClickHouse Cloud, and provide guidance available to you before you need our help. We've developed the Knowledge Base to assist with very practical answers to common questions we get here in Support. We recognize that these areas still need more work, and we continue to iterate on making them better and more useful (your feedback is always welcome!)
Proactive support
One of the areas that we're continuing to focus on is how to bring you the knowledge you need more proactively and before you know you need it. Near real-time performance is what we expect from ClickHouse, so we believe our Support experience should match. Our ClickHouse Cloud team has significant monitoring and alerting in place for thresholds or signals in all our Cloud services. As a result you may already have received a Case already from our Support team reaching out to you to notify you of an alert on your workload - around 5% of all cases each month are created by the ClickHouse team for you! We want your service to be running at top speed and as efficiently as possible, and we're happy to help you get it there!
In the upcoming blogs in this series, you'll get to know some of our team members and some of their favorite technical solutions they've helped develop with our users.
