Support | The OpenNMS Group

Support for OpenNMS

When you purchase commercial software and you run into problems, you can always complain to the company that got the check. But what happens when you download open source software for free off the Internet? Who supports free software?

With OpenNMS, the community provides a number of support options at no cost. However, there are times when that is not enough. If your company relies on OpenNMS, the purchase of commercial support gets you directly in contact with the people most likely to be able to solve your problems. Plus, revenues from support go directly into making the product better.

Many commercial software companies charge extra for support, and you are required to pay those fees in order to get upgrades and bug fixes. It is a bit ironic to buy a piece of software and then to find out it doesn’t work due to a bug, and then to have to pay extra to get it to do what it should have done in the first place.

Since all of OpenNMS is free and open, we at the OpenNMS Group have to earn your business. If you decide that our support isn’t worth the money, you can still use the latest version of the product at no cost. But we think that once you experience working with our knowledgeable staff, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

How Does It Work?

OpenNMS requires no license keys, so there is no way for us to track whether you have one instance of OpenNMS running or ten, or if you are monitoring 500 devices or 50,000. So we did away with all of that “node based” pricing. Each OpenNMS support package includes a certain number of contacts who can open tickets. The lowest number is two: one primary and one backup. Contacts can open as many tickets as they require.

Support tickets are one of three types:

Configuration Questions: OpenNMS is amazingly powerful and configurable. Over 90% of tickets are opened with respect to getting OpenNMS to do a certain task. Often there may be more than one way to address an issue, and our experienced consultants can offer suggestions on the best way to solve the problem.
Bugs: Even the best software has bugs. Due to the architecture of OpenNMS they can usually be addressed quickly, and due to its open source nature a fix can be deployed in hours or days versus weeks and months.
Feature Requests: Rarely the answer to a support ticket is simply “OpenNMS doesn’t do that.” It is unusual, but you always have the option of purchasing a custom development project to add the missing feature. In addition, when it comes to determining new features to be added to the product, those requested by commercial customers are given a much higher priority.

Custom Support

The OpenNMS Group can also create custom support options for your particular needs. While normal support covers the operation of OpenNMS, it is also possible to purchase additional Developer Support if you need to ask questions about the code itself. The Ultra support package was designed for those companies who integrate OpenNMS with their customer-facing systems where downtime is very obvious. It includes Developer Support as well as the highest level of support offered.

Product	Contacts	Response Time	Hours
(Business Days are Monday-Friday, excluding Holidays. Normal Support Hours are 7am to 7pm US Eastern [New York] time.)
Standard	3	4 hours	7am-7pm Business Days
24×7	6	2 hour	7am-7pm Business Days, Emergency Support 24×7
Ultra	8	30 mins	7am-7pm Business Days, Emergency Support 24×7

Sounds Too Good to Be True, What’s the Catch?

Purchasing OpenNMS support is not a replacement for having knowledgeable management staff on hand. Ultimately our role is to maximize the value of OpenNMS to your organization, but it is outside the scope of support to create a management strategy or to train people on the use of the product. Luckily, we can also provide those services, just not as part of support.

What Our Clients Say

Papa John’s International

Our busiest dataflow for online ordering is dinner and lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Despite this, we only need one staffer on the weekend – for all of Papa John’s 3,400 locations. - Chris Rodman, Papa John’s International

New Edge Networks

In the last five years we’ve gone from 10,000 interfaces to 160,000 interfaces. It’s always going up and now there are more than a million RRD files on our Net App. And yet, our internal support costs have dropped dramatically as we got things more stable and acquired better management tools. - Scott McLaughlin, Director Infrastructure Operations

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