A Day in the Life of the OpenNMS Services Resident Engineer: Investigating Networks at Carrier Scale

When people think about professional service and support teams, they often imagine ticket queues and reactive troubleshooting. For the OpenNMS support and services team, the work is far more collaborative.

On any given day, our resident engineers are embedded in customer environments, exploring complex networks alongside operators, helping them better understand how their infrastructure behaves and how to get more value from the tools they already use.

Here’s a look at what that work looks like through the lens of a recent engagement with a major telecommunications company.

Rather than beginning with a ticket, our support and services engineers often start by stepping directly into a customer’s network topology.

In this case, the work centers around a GraphML based topology used to visualize microwave links across a large carrier network. These topologies are hierarchical by design, allowing engineers to navigate from high-level views down to individual sites and devices.

This kind of navigation is essential at scale. Large networks aren’t flat. Understanding how components relate to one another is often the first step towards a more meaningful investigation. Our resident engineers can explore and refine these views, so they reflect how the network is operated, not just how it’s documented.

Once inside a specific site, the focus shifts from structure to what the network is doing right now.

A core part of our service is helping customers bring live operational data into context. Rather than forcing operators to jump between multiple tools, we can help surface real-time metrics directly within topology views.

In this engagement, that meant pulling dynamic measurements into information panels associated with nodes and links. Metrics are retrieved at runtime and displayed alongside the relevant network elements, allowing engineers to understand performance metrics in context. This approach transforms topology beyond a basic map into a working surface for investigation and understanding.

One of the most valuable outcomes of this kind of work is visual clarity.

By comparing live measurements against expected target values defined in the topology, links can be visually highlighted when performance drifts outside acceptable ranges. Color-coded indicators allow engineers to quickly identify areas that may require attention before they escalate.

For large telecommunications networks, where issues can develop gradually and across many locations, this kind of visual feedback is critical. It enables proactive investigation rather than reactive troubleshooting.

Helping customers implement and refine these visual cues is a common theme in OpenNMS engineering engagements and one of the biggest values for OpenNMS as a platform.

No two customer environments are the same, and our support and services team works closely with customers to adapt solutions to real-world constraints, specific to each customer.

Microwave networks, for example, are often deployed in locations where fiber isn’t practical. As a result, site topologies tend to be compact and highly specialized. At the same time, large carrier environments frequently include multiple device types and vendors, sometimes spanning several generations of hardware.

Part of our role is helping customers navigate that complexity. Our engineers understand how different data models, terminologies, and behaviors fit together, and how to represent them consistently within monitoring and visualization tools.

This work isn’t about forcing uniformity. It’s about making diversity manageable.

In this case, some of the topology rendering and templating capabilities being used haven't been heavily documented yet. Advancing the solution required examining existing implementations, reviewing code, and experimenting directly within the platform to understand what was possible.

That kind of investigative work is a regular part of how we operate. By deeply understanding the platform and the equipment we are monitoring, we’re able to help customers unlock capabilities they may not have realized were available to them.

Much of this work takes place in staging environments, where ideas can be tested and refined without risk production data. The goal is to validate and shape solutions that can evolve alongside the customer’s network and business needs.

By helping customers explore topology-driven visualization, dynamic metrics, and contextual investigation, OpenNMS resident engineers lay the foundation for more scalable, more intuitive network operations over time.

A day in the life of the OpenNMS support and services team isn’t about closing tickets as quickly as possible or burning buckets of hours. It’s about working alongside customers to deeply understand their networks and help them operate with confidence.

That means:

• Navigating complex, layered network environments
• Connecting static topology with live operational data
• Making performance issues visible and intuitive
• Exploring platform capabilities to solve real customer problems

This is the kind of service modern networks require — and the kind of partnership OpenNMS strives to deliver every day.

Interested in learning more about what the OpenNMS support and services team can do for you? Contact us to speak with one of our network monitoring experts.