On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:28:23PM +0100, Adam Armstrong wrote:
Features for paying customers could be:
- heavier voting rights (paying customers priortize the todo queue)
- support response within X business hours
- X hours of remote support (more hours @ discounted rate)
- decent alerting
- API to intergrate observium with existing backend/CMDB (API to add,
delete & report on devices/ports)
Yup, this is what I was thinking of.
The alternative, of course, is to just cease free development and take the whole thing commercial.
This would be our least favoured option, but 100 paying customers are better than 3500 freeloaders :)
A few observations of the way that people think in our instituation/sector:
In a market where there are lots of monitoring tools of various types it's much easier for me to justify paying for a product which comes with support than it is to justify paying for a product with better/different features. Our management see free tools as valuable but risky. For some arbitary reason if we pay for the free tools they appear to be happier (the management, not the tools, although it can be hard to tell the difference).
At the same time we wouldn't be able to deliver anything without the plethora of free tools - from linux to nagios. Virtually all our monitoring is done on the free versions of Nagios and OpenNMS. Historical data on Cacti and Zabbix. From a technical point of view once you start paying for something it's expected that every last gram of usefulness is extracted from the product whereas we'd like the flexibility of changing product as the environment evolves. So investing heavily in something isn't done without a great deal of consideration. And, whilst Observium is a great product, which we've adopted very quickly, it won't scale to the 120,000 ports we have. Currently we limit the devices to just a couple of hundred routers and some appliances. The Powers That Be would expect, if we were paying, that it did everything. Currently we use cacti to collect a little about everything and Observium to collect everything about a few devices. That works for me but probably not for them.
Recurring payments are harder to arrange (operation budget, updated each year etc.) than a one off payment (capital, more control). Donations are very difficult to arrange. As is anything to do with paypal. It's just down to our finance system. Obviously, the easier it is, the more likely it is to happen.
Whilst it is your perogative to do whatever you want with your product you might want to consider that we tried Observium, loved it and I showed it off to a variety of people, who also loved it. So I installed it for them as well. We could do this because it was free and easy. Honestly, I think that if I had hoops to jump through, payment-wise, I wouldn't have done. So unless your userbase has already reached a critical mass where you don't need word of mouth then taking it completely commercial might backfire.
As I said earlier, support is something we'd pay for. We'd expect something on-par with other vendors we work with though. So: hardware sizing guides, full documentation, ticket systems, escalation mechanisms, someone to talk to etc. And, not wanting to antagonise people, something more than 'read the documentation' as a response to queries. Whilst BOFH style replies are amusing, and I've done enough of them myself, they wouldn't be appropriate when money has changed hands.
Apologies if anything appears to be contradictory. That's just how it is.
Mike