Yeah, I agree. We have the PoE with a green light.
I want to build that into the App, so it shows or walks through a series of steps like check the adapter that looks like THIS for a green light. Check GFI tripped, check cables connected in proper order to PoE and router etc. The customer wants to be able to do that themselves before calling in. I think that would eliminate a lot of the calls and customers can do things on their own time. I guess the App could also help them schedule a paid visit if it determines the ISP service is working, but they can’t figure out their stuff. I would almost like to have it refer them to a list of local computer/network shops instead. Or those ISPs that want to make money off that kind of visit could schedule themselves. From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof via Af Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:53 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's I feel you’re overthinking this, at the risk of adding more stuff to fail or for the customer to bitch about. We use the Tycon POEs with current indicator, we tell the customer the light should be green. That covers a lot of calls – cables unplugged or chewed or POE not getting AC power. If the customer thinks their Internet is down, and they have a customer supplied router, we tell them to power cycle the router, this is the most common issue. If the customer is 100% WiFi, we try to make sure they have a spare Ethernet cable on a LAN port of the router. Most laptops have an Ethernet port, we tell them to take their laptop over to the router, plug it in, and if they have Internet then they have a WiFi problem. Once these 3 steps are done, or if they are complaining about speed, I think Travis is right, you’re better off having them call. If nothing else, this may be an upsell opportunity, if they talk to a human. Or you may get to explain a few things about P2P or video streaming or botnets to them. From: Sterling Jacobson via Af<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:28 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's Lol! I imagine in the App a line with points on it that connect from both ends. Kind of like the Xbox line test. Where it shows green lights on the provider service, the unit on the side of the house, then the router inside their house, and then their device. It might break in the middle, so the phone could show that it sees their wifi, but on 4G it talks to the ISP and shows green dots up to their CPE, then a red dot for their router. It’s not complicated programming on the ISP side. It could even tell you if the customers router IP was registered in the ARP table, or if just the physical connection is made and no MAC or IP etc. I think most of us have a service table for the customer record that has the CPE IP address. Maybe it would need another table in the customer relation to the router, or maybe it’s implicit in the IP address or Gateway IP etc. From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof via Af Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:22 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's For VoIP we bridge the ATA ahead of the router. I love it when someone calls on the VoIP phone to tell us “the tower is down”. From: Shayne Lebrun via Af<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:56 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's What we need to do is get people to view the ‘internet light’ like the ‘check engine’ light on their car. It could mean ‘your gas cap is loose’ or it could mean ‘your driveshaft just fell out of your car’ but if you want to know, it’s going to cost $250 just for somebody to open the hood and plug in the diagnostic checker. Wouldn’t that be nice….. From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Chuck McCown via Af Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:53 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's As determined by DHCP adds a horrible layer of complexity for a cheap and simple device. How about ping to 8.8.8.8? From: Josh Luthman via Af<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 12:41 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's Red/green light for successful DNS and ping to a server determined by DHCP Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Chuck McCown via Af <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> wrote: What would be the determining factor? Ping DNS server OK? From: Jason McKemie via Af<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 11:03 AM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's A red/green led would probably suffice for this purpose. On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Gino Villarini via Af <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> wrote: We need a “device” that plugs between router and internet connection with a big screed that says Internet OK! Or Internef BAD… filter out calls with customer having issues with wifi Gino A. Villarini President Aeronet Wireless Broadband Corp. www.aeronetpr.com<http://www.aeronetpr.com> @aeronetpr From: "af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>" <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> Reply-To: "af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>" <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> Date: Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 1:47 PM To: "af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>" <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's *An app for my phone? Yuck *Something that pushes to cutomers letting them know we're having issues? Yuck *Something that let's the customer verify their particular service is good/not? That'd be great! *Web portal for billing, easy peasy Why a node fails probably won't be detectable by a machine - in some cases it's difficult for a person to narrow it down (radio, connectors, cables, ethernet, surge, etc) but I'd like to see ideas on this of course. I use/suggest an outgoing message. IF the customer is having issues and they do call us, they hear we're having issues and hang up. This means that we're not telling 100 people there are issues when 25 are effecting ending up with 75 calls next month saying we owe them a credit when they had nothing to do with an outage. Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340<tel:937-552-2340> Direct: 937-552-2343<tel:937-552-2343> 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Sterling Jacobson via Af <af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com>> wrote: What I really want is an integrated system that isn't stuck in the 90's. I want the customer to have an app on their phone that tells them when their network is having issues and why. I want it to also remind them to pay their bill and provide a lazy/easy way to do that. I want that same system to have an engineer app that tells us when nodes fail and why. So if a node goes down and it's important, it should show up on my phone and I can take action. One of those actions would be to message to outage impacted customers the ETA to fix etc. Emails from Cacti don't count.
