The cost of running an ISP is that you have to run an ISP. ;-)
I see a lot of people trying to run server-less, and you just can't... at least
not while being responsible. If you've got one VM, the work in more VMs isn't
dramatically different.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
Midwest Internet Exchange
The Brothers WISP
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Coudron" <david.coud...@advantenon.com>
To: "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" <af@af.afmug.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 1:35:53 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
I hear ya, but it is another system to support/upgrade/backup etc. We’d really
like to be in the business of building the ISP network and get out of the
server/application support business. We have looked at quite a few monitoring
systems, but haven’t found a good mix of hosted, robust, and reasonably priced.
Additionally, you need to either put them in the central office and live with
more traffic flowing over your DIA, or find some sort of distributed SNMP
polling solution. One of the biggest reasons to move to Sonar for us was to get
access to Pulse, and next generation network monitoring. To some extent we feel
like moved to a feature for feature comparison of where we were at with
Powercode and a slightly less reliable monitoring systems since we don’t have
the local BMUs grabbing the data. We have moved Sonar pollers out further into
the network to help with reliability, but now we have Linux devices we have to
remotely maintain again. I know I am whining about this, but we thought we
would be a lot closer to our ideal use case than where we ended up, and I am a
little sore that so many things appear to be part of v2 and it just keeps being
pushed a little beyond our reach.
Ideally we would like this to be the case, if it is possible and we haven’t
stumbled on it yet, we’d love to hear about it.
1. SNMP monitoring data collected on the Mikrotiks and passed to a central
database. Reasoning – We have them everywhere, we already committed to
maintaining them and they are close to the devices we want to get data from.
2. SNMP monitoring system lives inside of our billing system so that we
have the tie from customer router to SM to tower AP to tower router, to core
routers to edge routers all sitting in the same system and tied to the
customer. We thought Sonar was going to be that.
3. Ability to supplement the Sonar data with some simple math where the
SNMP data doesn’t provide exactly what were are looking for. In particular, or
Mimosa backhauls don’t provide simple utilization data, so we calculate that
ourselves in LibreNMS.
I am sure we are looking for pie in the sky stuff, but I thought we’d be closer
to this with Pulse than where we landed by quite a bit.
Regards,
David Coudron
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Mike Hammett
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 1:21 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
"We’d like to eliminate our external monitoring system (LibreNMS)."
I've actually been advocating for the exact opposite. Use APIs to pull the
up\down information into Sonar, but leave the work of monitoring to something
purpose-built to monitor.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
Midwest Internet Exchange
The Brothers WISP
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Coudron" < david.coud...@advantenon.com >
To: "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" < af@af.afmug.com >
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 12:51:29 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
I need to go back to the session we had with the Sonar help folks. It had to do
with monitoring and using the API to update fields on devices so that we could
get better monitoring data into Sonar. In working with the person at Sonar (I
don’t have written down which one) we both agreed that it appear it should be
working, but clearly wasn’t. Their take was that this wouldn’t be corrected in
v1. We needed to wait for the v2 API.
We’d like to eliminate our external monitoring system (LibreNMS). We’d really
like all of the data to be in Sonar and go to one spot for SNMP based data.
Preseem is our tool for latency, throughput, data volume and overall customer
experience. But all SNMP stuff would be nice to have in one spot. What we’d
really like to do is use the data pulled through SNMP and landing in Sonar and
do some math on it and store it back to Sonar. That would be ideal, but it
doesn’t look like that is possible.
Regards,
David Coudron
From: AF < af-boun...@af.afmug.com > On Behalf Of Cassidy B. Larson
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 12:38 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group < af@af.afmug.com >
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
We’ve been able to figure out most of our things we need with v1 API, but it’s
at the cost of an exponential number of API calls. This ends up being bad for
both us and our sonar instance. I think we tax it too heavily as we’re API
intensive :)
On Apr 23, 2020, at 11:15 AM, Cameron Crum < cc...@murcevilo.com > wrote:
David,
I'm curious what you can't do with the v1 API. I have yet to find something I
haven't been able to help people with in custom integrations with Sonar's API.
Obviously, things will change with v2, but I'd be curious to know what you are
needing.
On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 7:19 AM David Coudron < david.coud...@advantenon.com >
wrote:
<blockquote>
We see the same thing as Mike is referring to. We would really like to get to
v2.0. There has been quite a bit of discussion about it and webinars saying it
is ready and so on, but when you really press on the topic, you find out many
of the necessary features aren’t ready and you can’t migrate. We have been in
this state for months, and it doesn’t seem like anything will change anytime
soon. Our recommendation is, make absolutely sure the current feature set works
for you, do not assume you will be using v2.0 because that timeline isn’t set.
We want to move to v2.0 to take advantage of the new API stuff, as we’d like to
do some simple integration that doesn’t work with the v1.x API. We are also
hoping we will see improvement in the stability of the monitoring in v2.0. We
have found that the monitoring in the current version isn’t nearly as reliable
as Powercode and we have had to supplement it with another tool.
That being said, we can’t say enough about the integration with Preseem, as
Preseem has been an indispensable addition to our toolset. I imagine you could
use Preseem pretty successfully without Powercode or Sonar, but the Sonar to
Preseem integration makes it so easy to put Preseem in, and Preseem has a lot
of value. It is our most used monitoring and troubleshooting tool.
Regards,
David Coudron
From: AF < af-boun...@af.afmug.com > On Behalf Of Mike Hammett
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 7:06 AM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group < af@af.afmug.com >
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
No one I know is running 2.0 because it isn't finished and doesn't seem likely
to be finished by fall.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
Midwest Internet Exchange
The Brothers WISP
From: "Sterling Jacobson" < sterl...@avative.net >
To: "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" < af@af.afmug.com >
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 11:42:13 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
Text to customer isn’t a feature yet.
Are you running v2.0 Sonar already?
From: AF < af-boun...@af.afmug.com > On Behalf Of Sean Heskett
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 7:04 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group < af@af.afmug.com >
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
if you only want to do billing Platypus is still around and is relatively
cheap, but it is literally a billing platform only.
Sonar is a total CRM as well as business management platform...the whole
enchilada.
-sean
On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 6:58 PM < ch...@wbmfg.com > wrote:
<blockquote>
I used Plat years ago and was happy with it.
So glad to hear you are happy with Sonar.
Simon is a standup guy.
From: Sean Heskett
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 6:55 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] billing
Sonar is awesome, you won't be disappointed.
we started with platypus, moved to powercode, it was an upgrade from plat but
was way too clunky and at the time powercode couldn't do RADIUS so, after 18
months of trying to make our business model fit to the powercode way we moved
to Sonar and haven't looked back.
Sonar is very forward thinking with their service and they have just about
every integration under the sun you could think of (text to customer, fleet
tracking, preseem QoS, snail mail marketing etc.)
-Sean
On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 5:59 PM < ch...@wbmfg.com > wrote:
<blockquote>
I will probably be launching a new network this calendar year. So at some point
I will once again have to try to choose the best billing platform.
Leaking toward Sonar. Have used Plat in the past. Is Powercode still alive?
Opinions?
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