L18. Google Cloud Support Plans and Service Level Agreements
Video generating
Check back soon for the video lesson on Google Cloud Support Plans and Service Level Agreements
Google Cloud offers four support tiers and SLAs that define uptime commitments. The Digital Leader exam tests what each plan includes, how SLAs work, and what service credits are provided for violations.
Google Cloud Support Plans
Google Cloud offers four support plans:
Basic Support (Included)
- Access to documentation, community forums, and Google Cloud Console
- Billing support
- No technical support contacts
- Access to Cloud Status Dashboard
Standard Support ($29/month)
- Business-hours access to technical support via email
- P3 (non-production impairment): 4-hour response
- Unlimited support cases
- Recommended for development and experimentation
Enhanced Support ($500/month or 3% of monthly spend)
- 24/7 access to technical support for production issues
- P1 (critical): 1-hour response
- Recommended for production workloads
Premium Support (Custom pricing)
- 24/7 support with 15-minute P1 response time
- Dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- Customer Aware Support (visibility into your environment)
- Event management for planned activities
- Recommended for enterprise and business-critical workloads
Google Cloud Service Level Agreements
An SLA defines Google's commitment for service availability. If Google fails to meet the SLA, affected customers receive service credits. Common SLAs:
- Compute Engine: 99.99% for regional managed instance groups; 99.5% for single instance with standard persistent disk
- Cloud SQL: 99.95% with HA enabled; 99.5% without HA
- Cloud Storage: 99.95% for multi-region; 99.9% for regional
- GKE: 99.95% for the control plane
How to Maximize Availability
- Zonal resources: 99.5% SLA (single point of failure)
- Regional resources (multi-zone): 99.95-99.99% SLA (resilient to zone failures)
- Multi-region deployments: highest availability and disaster recovery
Choosing the Right Support Plan
| Scenario | Recommended Plan |
|---|---|
| Learning, development | Basic or Standard |
| Small production workloads | Standard or Enhanced |
| Business-critical production | Enhanced or Premium |
| Enterprise with regulated workloads | Premium |
Active Assist
Active Assist is Google Cloud's AI-powered recommendation engine that identifies opportunities to reduce cost, improve performance, and increase security. Recommendations appear in the Google Cloud console automatically. Recommender types: Idle resource, right-sizing, committed use discount, IAM policy, security, and more. Exam tip: Premium Support includes a dedicated TAM and 15-minute P1 response. Service credits are applied to future bills, not cash refunds. Multi-region deployments provide the highest SLA.
- ✓Four support plans: Basic (free), Standard, Enhanced (24/7 production), Premium (dedicated TAM, 15-min P1)
- ✓SLA violations result in service credits (billing credits) not cash refunds
- ✓Single-zone Compute Engine VMs have 99.5% SLA; regional managed instance groups have 99.99% SLA
- ✓Multi-region Cloud Storage has 99.95% SLA vs 99.9% for regional storage
- ✓Active Assist provides AI-powered recommendations for cost, performance, and security optimization
1. A company running mission-critical workloads on Google Cloud needs a 15-minute response time for critical outages and a dedicated Technical Account Manager. Which support plan do they need?
2. What does Google Cloud provide when it fails to meet an SLA commitment for a service?
Recommended: Pluralsight
Reinforce these lessons with Pluralsight's Google Cloud paths: structured video courses, GCP console labs, and practice exams for the Digital Leader certification.