01
Emergency Incident Response
Cluster stalled, members dropping, or a data grid that won't come back after a restart. A senior GemFire engineer joins a live bridge within 15 minutes with access to diagnose — not a ticket acknowledgement.
Tanzu GemFire Support
24/7 Tanzu GemFire Support with a 15-Minute Emergency SLA
Last reviewed by Scott Sternloff
AceMQ is Broadcom's VMware Expert Advantage Partner of the Year for the Americas. Our engineers run GemFire in trading, telecom, and payments environments where a two-second GC pause is an incident — heap pressure, members leaving on partitions, WAN sender backlog, and multi-hour disk-store recovery. Every ticket reaches a named senior engineer who already knows your region topology.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
- min emergency SLA
- 15
- across Americas, EMEA, APAC
- 24/7
- enterprise customers
- 160+
- countries served
- 26+
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ GemFire consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
Incident Triage
GemFire problems we fix every week
These are real symptoms from real GemFire production environments — and the first thing our engineers check when one comes in.
| Symptom you're seeing | What we check first | Typical resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Whole cluster stalls for seconds at a time; clients time out in bursts | GC logs for full and mixed pause duration against member-timeout. A heap pause longer than member-timeout gets the paused member evicted from the distributed system, so the pause becomes a membership event — heap sizing and failure detection have to be tuned together, not separately. | 1–3 hours |
| Member "unexpectedly left the distributed system" with no crash and no OOM | Locator and peer logs for suspect processing, then member-timeout, ack-wait-threshold, and the network path between hosts. A brief partition or a paused JVM both look identical from the outside — the logs distinguish them, and the fix is different for each. | 2–4 hours |
| WAN gateway sender queue growing; the remote site is falling further behind | Queue size and batch statistics per gateway sender against receiver apply rate. Usually too few dispatcher threads, a batch-size tuned for a different message profile, or a receiver-side bottleneck — and with a persistent queue the backlog starts consuming disk while you diagnose. | 2–4 hours |
| Entries the application expects are simply gone, with no error anywhere | Region eviction and expiration attributes. Heap LRU with a destroy action on a non-persistent region silently drops entries under memory pressure — which is correct behaviour and almost never what the team intended when they wanted overflow-to-disk. | Under 2 hours |
| Full cluster restart taking hours to return to service | Disk-store oplog count and total size per member, and which member holds the most recent copy of each persistent region. Recovery replays oplogs and blocks until the newest copy is online — so a cluster with compaction disabled and years of oplogs recovers slowly by design. | Same day |
| Serialization or ClassCastException errors after a rolling upgrade | PDX type registry against the deployed class versions on each member. A field added or reordered on one side, a class that quietly moved off PDX to Java serialization, or read-serialized set inconsistently across members will all surface only once mixed versions are live. | 1–3 hours |
| Function execution timing out on partitioned regions under load | Region colocation and the function's routing keys. A function that should execute on a single member but touches data across buckets turns one local call into a cross-member fan-out, and the timeout is the symptom rather than the problem. | 1–3 hours |
Resolution times reflect typical GemFire engagements under an active AceMQ support contract. Every P1 closes with a written root-cause analysis.
What's Included
Everything in your GemFire support contract
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
- 02
Root Cause Analysis
Every P1 closes with a written RCA: what failed, why, the fix applied, and the heap, timeout, or region configuration change that stops it recurring. Delivered as standard, not on request.
- 03
Latency & Heap Tuning
GC selection and heap sizing for sub-millisecond operation, off-heap configuration, eviction and expiration policy, OQL index design, and client pool sizing against your real P99 requirement rather than a default.
- 04
WAN & Multi-Site Operations
Gateway sender and receiver tuning, active-active conflict handling, persistent queue sizing, and site-failover procedures — including what to do when a site comes back after hours of divergence.
- 05
Persistence & Recovery Assurance
Disk-store layout, compaction policy, and rehearsed full-cluster restart procedures with measured recovery times, so your DR plan reflects how long recovery actually takes rather than an estimate.
- 06
Broadcom Licensing & Entitlement
As Broadcom's Expert Advantage Partner of the Year, we handle Tanzu GemFire subscription questions alongside the technical ones: entitlement reconciliation, true-up exposure, renewal terms, and quotes inside 24 hours.
Why AceMQ
What you get that you don't get elsewhere
Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner of the Year
AceMQ holds Broadcom's top VMware partner award for the Americas in 2025. In practice that means an escalation path into Tanzu engineering when a problem is genuinely a product defect — and one team handling both your support and your licensing.
Named Engineers, Zero Cold Start
The same senior engineers stay on your account. They know your region types, your colocation model, and your heap profile — so a P1 starts with diagnosis instead of you narrating your topology while the cluster is down.
No Tier-1 Triage Layer
You reach a senior GemFire engineer directly by phone, email, or Slack. No help desk collecting information to pass along, no escalation approval between you and someone who can read a GC log against a membership timeline.
JVM Depth, Not Just Grid Configuration
Most GemFire incidents are JVM incidents wearing a distributed-systems costume. We diagnose across G1 and ZGC behaviour, off-heap allocation, safepoint pauses, and OS-level page cache — because that is where the pause that killed your member actually came from.
Genuine Follow-the-Sun Coverage
Engineers across 26+ countries and every time zone. Your 3am membership storm is someone's mid-afternoon — no overnight skeleton crew, no waiting for a region to wake up.
Proactive, Not Just Reactive
Quarterly health checks plus shared intelligence across our support base. When a version-specific bug surfaces on one customer's cluster, every affected customer hears about it before it reaches their production.
We support GemFire wherever it's deployed
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
- VMware vSphere & Tanzu
- Kubernetes & OpenShift
- Tanzu Platform / Cloud Foundry
- Bare metal & on-premise
- AWS (EC2, EKS)
- Microsoft Azure (AKS)
- Google Cloud (GKE)
- Hybrid & multi-site WAN
- Air-gapped / no outbound access
- GemFire 9.x
- GemFire 10.x
- Apache Geode deployments
Escalation Path
Your first hour of a GemFire outage
Every tier reaches a senior GemFire engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
- 15 minfirst responseEmergencyProduction down, messages not flowing, queue manager failure
- 1 hourfirst responseCriticalSevere degradation, high error rates, approaching capacity
- 4 hoursfirst responseHighPerformance issues, configuration problems, non-critical failures
- Next Dayfirst responseStandardQuestions, guidance, best practices, non-urgent improvements
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
T+Elapsed15:00
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
- T+00:00Paged
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
- T+15:00Live
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
- T+30:00If needed
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
- AfterEvery P1
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Pricing
What does AceMQ GemFire support cost?
AceMQ GemFire support contracts typically run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on SLA level, scope (number of clusters or nodes, and environments) and deployment (self-managed, cloud-managed or Kubernetes).
| What moves the price | How it changes the contract |
|---|---|
| SLA level | Business-hours cover costs less than 24/7 cover with a 15-minute emergency response. |
| Scope | More clusters or nodes, and more environments, make a larger contract. |
| Deployment | Self-managed, cloud-managed and Kubernetes estates need different amounts of hands-on work. |
Covering several technologies under one contract, for example RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis, earns an aggressive discount.
Support In Practice
GemFire problems we've already solved
GemFire support and consulting work from AceMQ. Each card links to the full write-up: the grid, what AceMQ diagnosed or changed, and the result.
GemFire Cluster and Region Architecture Assessment
Enterprise Technology Organizations
A structured review of GemFire region design, WAN topology, JVM tuning and security configuration, producing a risk-prioritized roadmap before problems reach production.
GemFire
Java
SpringGemFire Members Leaving the Cluster During GC Pauses
Regional Electronic Trading Platform
GemFire members kept leaving the distributed system around market open with no crash and no out-of-memory error. AceMQ traced it to garbage collection pauses longer than the failure-detection window and retuned heap and thresholds together.
GemFireJava
LinuxGemFire WAN Gateway Queue That Never Caught Up
Regional Telecom Operator
After a link outage, a GemFire gateway sender queue between two sites kept growing instead of draining. AceMQ tuned the sender and receiver, drained the backlog and set up support for the replication path.
GemFireJavaObservabilityGemFire Region Colocation Redesign for Slow Function Calls
European Card Processor
Function executions and queries across non-colocated partitioned regions were timing out under load. AceMQ redesigned the region layout around the access pattern and migrated the data with a side-by-side run.
GemFireJavaSpring
Support options
Four tiers of GemFire support.
AceMQ offers Tanzu GemFire support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident management for grids your team runs, proactive monitoring that finds heap, membership and disk-store risk first, managed GemFire on your own infrastructure, and fully managed GemFire on AceMQ infrastructure. GemFire 9.x, 10.x and Apache Geode are covered, with VMware Tanzu licensing for US customers.
- Tier 1
GemFire 24/7 Support & Incident Management
You run it, we back you up
- GC pauses lined up against member-timeout and locator suspect processing
- Gateway sender queue backlogs traced to dispatcher, batch and receiver limits
- Slow restarts traced to oplog volume and missing disk stores
Best for: Teams that run GemFire or Geode themselves and need senior cover at 3am.
- Tier 2
GemFire 24/7 Support with Proactive Monitoring
You run it, we watch it with you
- Heap, eviction and critical thresholds checked against real region growth
- Region type, redundancy and colocation reviewed against query and function patterns
- Full-cluster restart rehearsed and timed, with disk-store compaction checked
Best for: Estates where a full restart time, or a silent eviction, has never been measured.
- Tier 3
Managed GemFire on Your Infrastructure
We run it in your cloud or data centre
- Heap, GC, membership and gateway queue monitoring with paging
- Rolling upgrades one member group at a time, with redundancy restored between steps
- Rebalance and restore-redundancy runs after member changes
Best for: Regulated teams that must keep GemFire inside their own boundary but do not want its operations on their own rota.
- Tier 4
Fully Managed GemFire on AceMQ Infrastructure
We host it and run it, as a service
- Region design and sizing agreed with your application team
- Disk stores and restart time measured, not assumed
- Rolling upgrades planned and rehearsed ahead of production
Best for: Teams that want the data grid's speed without owning its operations.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs GemFire day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for GemFire
Everything else AceMQ does for GemFire.
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for GemFire. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
- ConsultingGemFire consulting and services
- LicensingGemFire licensing
- LifecycleEnd-of-life software support
- Enterprise supportOpen source support across your whole stack
- GuideGemFire guide
Support for the rest of your stack
Messaging & Streaming
- RabbitMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Kafka supportMessaging & Streaming
- IBM MQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- ActiveMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Azure Service Bus supportMessaging & Streaming
- Amazon SQS supportMessaging & Streaming
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub supportMessaging & Streaming
- Redpanda supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Pulsar supportMessaging & Streaming
- Message Queuing supportMessaging & Streaming
Databases & Caching
Search & Analytics
Lakehouse & Compute
Observability & Monitoring
Data Integration
Cloud & Containers
API Management
See support for all 51 technologiesShow fewer
Related services
What does AceMQ GemFire support include?
Our Tanzu GemFire support covers 24/7 emergency incident response with a 15-minute SLA, root cause analysis on every P1, heap and latency tuning, WAN gateway operations, disk-store and recovery assurance, version upgrades, and Broadcom licensing support. Every ticket is handled by a named senior engineer assigned to your account. There is no tier-1 triage layer and no per-incident charge.
Our cluster keeps losing members with no crash. Can you actually find that?
Yes — it is one of the most common GemFire calls we take. A member leaving without a crash is almost always either a JVM pause exceeding member-timeout or a transient network fault, and the two look identical from the application side. We correlate GC logs, safepoint records, locator suspect-processing entries, and host-level network counters on a shared timeline. Once the cause is established the fix is usually a combination of heap or GC change and a deliberate member-timeout value, rather than raising the timeout and hoping.
How fast do you respond to a GemFire production outage?
P1 emergencies — cluster stalled, members dropping, grid unavailable — get a 15-minute first response with a senior engineer joining a live bridge. P2 critical issues are 1 hour, P3 high-priority 4 hours, and P4 standard questions next business day. These are contractual, not best-effort targets.
Do you support Apache Geode as well as commercial GemFire?
Yes. GemFire and Geode share a core, and most of the operational surface — regions, membership, disk stores, WAN, PDX — behaves the same way. We support both, including environments that mix them, and we will tell you honestly when a specific problem is one that the commercial build fixes and the open-source build does not.
Why does a full cluster restart take so long, and can you make it faster?
Recovery replays disk-store oplogs and waits for the member holding the most recent copy of each persistent region before serving traffic. Clusters that have run for years with compaction tuned conservatively accumulate enormous oplog volume, and recovery time scales with it. We reduce that with compaction and oplog sizing changes, parallel disk-store layout, and in some cases a redesign of which regions genuinely need persistence — then we rehearse the restart and measure it, so your DR plan carries a real number.
Can you help with our Broadcom Tanzu GemFire licensing and true-up?
Yes, and Tanzu customers ask us this constantly. As Broadcom's VMware Expert Advantage Partner of the Year for the Americas, we reconcile deployed member and core counts against purchased entitlements, surface true-up exposure before an audit does, and negotiate renewal and multi-year terms. Licensing quotes come back within 24 hours, and the engineers sizing your cluster are the same team advising on what you need to license.
Which GemFire versions and features do you support?
VMware Tanzu GemFire 9.x and 10.x, now sold by Broadcom, and Apache Geode, the open-source project GemFire 9 was built on. Coverage includes the features production estates depend on: partitioned and replicated regions, persistence and disk stores, WAN gateways for multi-site replication, continuous queries, PDX serialization, the Spring integration and the client and server caching APIs. Deployment models covered are bare metal, virtual machines, Kubernetes and Tanzu Application Service. We also review the JVM configuration that GemFire is so sensitive to, which is where Broadcom's own scope of support stops. For GemFire 9.x and 10.x or Apache Geode releases that no longer receive fixes, AceMQ's OSSeva platform backports CVE patches.
How do you configure and tune GemFire for a high-performance in-memory data grid?
Sizing comes first: enough heap for the in-memory data plus headroom for eviction and critical thresholds, off-heap storage where object sizes justify it, and garbage collection settings chosen for pause time rather than throughput. Then the data model: the right region type per dataset, colocation of related data on the same members, and a serialization strategy that does not deserialize whole objects to read one field. Then the operational settings: member timeouts, redundancy zones, disk store placement on fast storage, and WAN queue limits. Most GemFire clusters we take on were configured once at deployment and never revisited as the data grew, and a review typically finds several settings that explain the incidents the team has learned to live with.
Can we work with AceMQ on GemFire without a long contract?
Yes. AceMQ works on GemFire in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual partner engagement that covers 24/7 support, proactive reviews and named engineers. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual partnership once the first engagement is done.
How much does AceMQ GemFire support or consulting cost?
Every AceMQ proposal is tailored to your requirements: your GemFire environment, the SLA you need, the hours of cover and the scope of work. Most contracts run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on the SLA, the scope and how GemFire is deployed, with aggressive discounts when several technologies share one contract. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
An In-Memory Grid Fails at Memory Speed. Support Should Match.
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running GemFire for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
A senior GemFire engineer, not a sales queueQuote requests answered within 1 hourAd hoc engagements or an annual partnership
Production incident right now?Email a GemFire Architect
Get in Touch
Talk to a GemFire Expert
Send us a message and we'll follow up within 1 hour — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.
305-204-2607info@acemq.com66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130
Miami, FL 33130
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