Service Management and Support

Incident Response

The speed at which the Sign In Canada support team responds to production service incidents depends on when the incident is detected or reported (all times listed are eastern time):

Planned Maintenance

Software Maintenance

The Sign in Canada software requires regularly scheduled maintenance to meet the established service levels and to introduce new features. To minimize the effect on relying parties, maintenance activities that require taking the service off-line are normally scheduled during a defined software maintenance window, from 4am to 5am eastern time on Sunday mornings. Relying parties are not normally notified of planned outages that take place during this window, which are normally 10 to 25 minutes in duration. In exceptional cases, where a maintenance outage needs to be scheduled outside of this window, the Sign In Canada team will provide relying parties with at least 7 days notice.

Network Maintenance

The Sign in Canada production environment leverages network security infrastructure that is managed by the TBS Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure team. This infrastructure also requires periodic maintenance, which is normally scheduled for the Thursday following the 2nd Tuesday of the month, from 8pm to midnight. Planned network infrastructure maintenance does not always affect service availability, but in cases where an outage is possible the Sign In Canada team will make every effort to inform relying parties in advance.

Unscheduled maintenance

The Sign In Canada production environment leverages cloud, platform and infrastructure support from both TBS and SSC. They reserve the right to schedule emergency maintenance outages for critical updates, with the goal of providing relying parties at least twenty-four (24) hours advance notice. Both parties will work on a best-efforts basis, to schedule these outages during non-peak hours and limit their occurrence to strictly necessary upgrades and required maintenance. (It should be noted that this is for emergency maintenance and not emergency fixes following an incident).

Service dependencies

The Sign In Canada service leverages three credential services provided by Shared Services Canada, namely the Government of Canada-branded credential service “GCKey”, the credential broker service “Government Sign-In by Verified.Me”, and the 2nd-factor authentication service. The service levels for these three services are separate and distinct from those of the Sign In Canada production environment.

Relying Party Support

Relying parties can report incidents or request troubleshooting assistance by sending an email to SignIn-AuthentiCanada@tbs-sct.gc.ca. The Sign In Canada support team monitors this mailbox from 8am to 5pm on working days.