Open Partners

1. You are here:
2. Handbook
3. Support Team Handbook
4. Partnerships
5. Open Partners

Open Partner Track Description

Resellers, integrators and other sales and services partners join the partner program in the Open track. Open is for all partners in the DevOps space, or ItaaS and other adjacent spaces that are committed to investing in their DevOps practice buildout. Also, the Open track is for partners seeking to develop customers or just wanting to learn about Gitlab and participate in the Gitlab partner community. GitLab Open Partners may or may not be transacting partners, and can earn product discounts or referral fees.

Contacting Support

Open Partners may contact us on behalf of one of their customers by submitting a ticket. To ensure proper ticket routing, which helps to prevent first response delays, they should:

1. use this specialized form
2. verify that the customer already has a contact record in Salesforce that is associated with the correct account record

Zendesk will use the information in the form to change the requester field to contain the name of the partner's customer. The reason for this is that GitLab Support works directly with an Open Partner's customer, using the customer's support plan level, not the partner's.

If an Open Partner wants to be involved in a ticket, they should indicate that within the Description of the ticket when they are submitting it. In response, we will add them to the CC list of the ticket.

Note to Support: Never associate a customer to an Open Partner's organization, or vice-versa!

File uploads

When Open Partners needs to send support files, we have 2 methods available to accommodate this:

• Standard ticket uploads (20MB max)
• Support Uploader

Examples of Support Ticket Submission and Handling for Open Partners

Support provided to Open Partners and their customers will vary depending on the circumstances under which a ticket is raised. Some examples are:

1. An Open Partner raises a ticket, using the Open Partner form, on behalf of their end customer. They should do so under the Customer's account. We will deliver support based on the customer's subscription. Support will correspond with the end customer directly. Please note that if the partner incorrectly types the customer's email address, the ticket may not be properly associated with the customer organization. This can be corrected with the following steps:

   1. Update Organization Email (partners) to use the correct email
   2. Change Requester by clicking change link under the ticket subject
   3. Submit the ticket to save your changes

2. Same example as above, except this time the Open Partner is fulfilling a services engagement for their end customer, and so needs to be included in the ticket work. In the partner troubleshooting section of the form, the partner should ask to be included in the CC list on the ticket in question.

3. An Open Partner is doing commercial work for a customer and raises a ticket. They should do so under their own account using a subscription they have purchased for themselves. We will deliver support based on the subscription the partner has purchased.

4. An Open Partner is doing internal training, testing or knowledge building. They should raise a ticket under their account using their NFR licences.

These examples are not exhaustive. If in doubt, ask questions about the situation under which the ticket is being raised.