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 three: one primary and two backups. 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.

Support Options

There are two main options for support: Standard and ULTRA. Standard Support covers questions concerning all aspects of the OpenNMS application. ULTRA support is designed for service providers and other companies who present the data that OpenNMS creates to end users. ULTRA provides for a quicker response time as issues may be immediately apparent to end users, as well as support concerning integration of OpenNMS to other systems. In addition, each ULTRA customer has a dedicated OpenNMS consultant who is extremely familiar with their implementation.

Normal support hours are 7am to 7pm Eastern US time (New York time), business days. A 24×7 support option is available in addition to either support package.

Response Time	Standard	ULTRA
Non-Urgent OpenNMS Issue	24 hours	4 hours
Urgent OpenNMS Issue	4 hours	1 hour
OpenNMS Application Outage	4 hours	1 hour

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

Towerstream 4G Wireless ISP Gets the Network to Work – With Extra Wins in Asset Management and Customer Service.

We are an ISP. Our network is what we actually sell, and that’s why we must have top performance from our network management system. We didn’t get top performance with our old system, but we do with OpenNMS. - Michael Micheletti, Manager of Engineering, Towerstream

The Pennsylvania State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

In six hours, we had OpenNMS running with all the functionality that it had taken us three years to develop with Openview NNM. This was a rude but happy awakening. - Dale Meyerhoffer, Senior Network Analyst, Hershey Medical Center

City of Grapevine, Texas

I was the only IT person at the office, but with OpenNMS, it was easy to keep track of everything on the network, including our snow and ice-covered traffic light system. If there had been a problem, OpenNMS would have let me know. - John Jennery, City of Grapevine, Texas

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