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Ask Slashdot: Management Software For Small Independent ISP?
First time accepted submitter Vorknkx writes "I work in a small ISP. Most of our customers have cable modems but some of them are using Canopy or Ubiquity products. To manage all that, we're using a number of programs and solutions not necessarily made for such a task that are kept up to date simply using copy and paste. We have an Access database for all our internet customers, an Excel document for our wireless users, The Dude to monitor every user and a custom-made web application to monitor traffic. Needless to say, we're starting to hit the limit and juggling between all these programs is a complete pain. Is there some kind of all-in-one solution that would allow us to eliminate all the copy and paste while keeping the same functionality?"
Not really. To have true management you need SNMP. Ubiquiti doesn't have a full snmp MIB, which is a pain. Great products, poor management capability.
Sounds like a job for a custom software designer/programmer
Just build yourself a LAMP setup, with workers feeding a database, and web GUI to access/update.
Sync data from other sources into that, to provide a single converged view of whatever item (customer, router, location, network link...whatever). (Don't forget copious use of memcache btw)
Trust me....this works really well and scales to millions of customers :-)
Doesn't anybody do that anymore?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You must be joking, running an isp from an access database!
But you could look and see if Jet is within your budget.
http://www.obsidian.com.au/products/jet/jet-isp-telco
At the very least a base install will give you some billing software and hooks for other automation. It wouldn't hurt to drop them a line, at any rate.
disclaimer: I used to work for obsidian ~6 years ago. they're a small company, but full of bright people and they have a lot of experience in the area. if jet isn't for you i have no doubts they can at least give you some honest advice on what to look at instead that's within your budget, fits your needs.
Well they don't have to be Indian, just suggested that to play off the stereotypes, any nationality will do. Just hire a whole bunch of office drones.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Why are you using access?
I suggest you get either MySQL or MSSQL to manage your contacts before you find yourself wishing you had put all that data on a real database. Oh wait you are starting to see that already.
Solarwinds?
What are you copying and pasting? You must be looking for some sort of CRM.
http://www.insidecrm.com/articles/crm-blog/the-top-10-opensource-crm-solutions-53507/
You say you are wroking for this small ISP? That means they are also paying you small. If they haven't figured out how they are going to support a larger customer base then leave before the ship sinks. Don't stay loyal to stupid people. The promise of stocks went out during the dot bomb era.
Do any of the tools on the cable TV work with the HSI system?
So, you have an access database to track your Internet customers, and an Excel sheet tracking wireless customers.
Why? How did this come into being? Who thought two different solutions to essentially the same issue were a good idea? Or did no one notice? Why haven't you consolidated these (preferably in the database? Did no one know how to make that work?
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the technical chops of people I've never met. Maybe there are really good reasons you have the solution you have. Maybe it was really the result of a series of "right decision at the time." But as an outsider, it certainly doesn't sound that way.
I'm sure there are some suggestions that could be made to integrate your existing tools better. I'm sure there are off the shelf tools that you could use.
What I'm worried about, however, is that the big problem is that have a technical capability problem, and you're trying to solve it as a tool problem. If that's not accurate, great. But I've seen company after company try to solve a "we don't have the tech skills" problem by finding "the magic tool" that will compensate. And I've rarely seen it end well.
I realize this isn't directly a response to your question. Just a suggestion before that, before you start tinkering with zoomier tools, you take a hard look at who's going to install, configure, maintain, and administer the tool, and make sure you're confident they're up to the task. If not, solve that issue first. Tools won't fix it.
Check out www.Powercode.com which is a per user per month software platform that does it all. A good free alternative is www.freeside.biz which can do it all as well but will require more effort on your part and comes with no bells and whistles.
Pete
Stackexchange network is leaking...
This is time for a small, custom-written bit of software. Put together a rough list of your requirements, ask around for recommendations, and contact a couple of programming houses. Heck, contact a local university and talk to them about student projects - sometimes that's not a bad way to go for a small application.
Your requirements are unusual, and aren't going to be covered well by off-the-shelf software. Professional quality custom programming will cost thousands of dollars. So what? How much is this going to boost your efficiency? Reduce stupid errors? Likely the long-term savings in salaries and customer goodwill will more than pay for the project.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
OpenNMS?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
There are commercial apps for ISPs to manage customers. When I worked for a dial-up/isdn/t1 service provide about 12 years ago, we used Platypus.
We used it both for customer service / billing and technical support. It had a windows client and a web client and used Microsoft SQL server on the backend.
Even a help desk software package could help. The great thing about Platypus is that it could handle all the credit card and billing stuff too. You might also look at HEAT or Remedy for just keeping a customer database and doing tech support.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
relational database
I was in your position some years ago. I also know that our main operator wasted millions in Incognito software just to throw it away, and ended up paying millions to Microsoft. Obvious not the average "small ISP", but I hope you get across my point. Small/medium ISPs end up writing their own custom software, because there is not a specialized/vertical package that works as it should. I ended up doing that too, and connecting my software to a in-house developed ERP package. Check my profile in linked.in. Regards, http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/rui-ribeiro/16/ab8/434/
Depends on how big you guys really are, you say small but to me a small isp is less than 50k subscribers. If you're much smaller than this then you have more options. Anyway there aren't a lot of good drop in solutions for monitoring thousands of devices unless you're planning on spending a ton of money. Easiest way to roll a cable modem monitoring system (Note: I have personal experience doing this for ~5 million subscribers) is to build a database (MySQL/etc) and then create a collection script in perl/php/other scripting language that collects your cable modem ip addresses directly from the CMTS. Your script will log directly into the cmts execute 'show cable modem' or appropriate command for the platform your using and you will log all this information into your database. Your second script will use SNMP to collect statistics from those logged cable modem ip addresses. Things you'll want to collect would be the transmit, receive, downstream snr, upstream snr, interface statistics, etc. Once you have this information then you can put together a webpage that will present the data with nice graphs that give you a good idea of what's going on. This same script can act as a monitoring system to collect modem state changes or you can use a trap system like Nagios to just catch the alarms the CMTS can be configured to kick out. Good luck!
http://www.ideco-software.ru/products/billing/index.html?l=104
Linux-based billing solution aimed to small/mid-level ISPs, quite feature-rich. We're using it at our school to rule out 50 mbit/s channel to all teachers and students, without any of those choking up said channel with torrents or something. Official site is in russian only, too bad, but i think it can be ruled out.
I am not in the ISP business, but since you didn't tell us what you're using Access or Excel for, it's darn hard to tell you how to replace them.
I would think that you would need billing, help desk, and network management products.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Used in a past life for billing and configuration. Fast and reliable but still used separate NMS package to monitor our systems.
Call Cisco, ask for their just bought NDS subsidiary.
They have offices in the UK, Canada, and Israel that all do development and support teams scattered around.
They're who you want to talk to.
Expect to have to spend real money, but the alternative of doing your own in house development is likely to cost even more money.
I wrote a customer billing, administrative, ticketing and sales system for a small ISP (that ended up growing into a larger hosting company). The system integrated with the email server, RADIUS server, vendor ticketing systems a web portal for clients, had it's own inventory tracking system, IP allocation tool and managed the sales process from lead to quote to billable account. It is definitely doable to write your own but keep in mind that this does require some commitment of resources to not only write the software but maintain it in the future. If you want an integrated system, writing your own is the way to go and developing those systems while you are smaller is much easier. In general commercial ISP management systems are either too expensive, too rigid, or too fragmented.
TUCOWS has a product called Platypus that handles the customer database, billing, and will execute scripts to provision services... http://www.ispbilling.com/
Take a look at Ubersmith. It's designed for quite a few use cases and is pretty much a complete CRM for ISPs/Telcos/Colo facilities/etc with integration into just about everything.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
It's included in every version of Windows and it will do what you need it to do.
If that doesn't work, just go to a nearby casino and play the slots. After a couple hours of that and a few drinks, you won't care about any of that IT nonsense anymore. The problem will still be there, but it won't be YOUR problem. At least not for the moment.
Feel free to borrow some money from the company when doing this. You'll be able to pay them back with your winnings. :)
You do realize that Access is fully capable of maintaining the data set of at least 10,000 customers, right? In other words, good enough for a small ISP serving a small town.
"I work in a small ISP."
This sums up the problems with most "Ask Slashdot" stories.
This "small" ISP could have 50 clients or 15,000.
There is no way to know.
Budgets? Staffing? Your guess is as good as mine.
ISP management??
Maybe you should try ISPCONFIG. (www.ispconfig.com). It's free, but the authors offers commercial support.
... it's a start. Take a look at the web hosting management platforms of choice. WHMCS, HostBill, ClientExec, and a dozen others. At their core, they are all just customer management platforms (billing, support, provisioning) that happen to interface with popular web hosting applications. Although they're meant for web hosting, their open APIs should allow you to hook just about any action you want.
Customer invoice not paid? Send a reminder the next day. Send a second reminder three days later. Add a late fee five days later. Send a final reminder and pending suspension notice seven days later. Suspend service on the tenth day. Automatically reconnect server (with or without a reconnect fee) when the invoice is paid.
Customer opens a support ticket? Browse their entire history -- service history, provisioning responses, payment history, private notes, email history, ticket history, everything -- from the same interface you use to manage the ticket.
Customer wants to add / upgrade / downgrade / cancel service? Hook the API into your existing provisioning systems, or write some low-level scripts to do the insertion / removal.
Customer wants an invoice reprinted from six months ago? Do it.
Most of these systems are built with a lot of self-service in mind, so things like adding or removing features or changing packages are a snap. The only hard part you'd have is integrating them with your provisioning system. Cost is typically around $12 - $20 / month, or around $300 - $500 one-time. If you have a huge volume of customers, you might also want to look into integrating with a more robust support system like Kayako. WHMCS has notoriously weak (read: simple) ticketing, but it always gets the job done for me and my 1500-ish customers.
From all I have seen and heard - all the commercial-ware you can buy (at the costs of 50k to almost infinite) will be buggy and make you swear and curse every single day.
So, better hire a good developer (maybe you consider being that yourself) and let him develop custom solutions to the problems you face. He is probably going to do it in Perl and Postgres. Running on Linux or BSD, of course. Make sure the guy (few girls to find for that) codes in a readable way (yeah, it's possible), puts in proper comments and writes proper system docs. This will set you back 100k per year, but you will gain a first-rate solution which at some point will run like a breeze.
Of course, you need a person to manage the Developer, and that person must be willing and able to look into code and documentation. He (also very few she-s for that job) must ACTUALLY check code and docs and give proper feedback. Many contemporary managers have the ignorant stance that this is "techie stuff" and "a black box I am not interested in" and they will get many, many nasty days of surprises from that attitude.
Also, code must be properly tested and you need a realistic testbed. You need a manager who understands this need.
Maybe you don't have this and some MBA troll will foist some HP/Oracle/M$/Cisco/Checkpoint/Juniper Crapola onto you. These corpos can also hand out nice bribes to the MBA troll - which increases the likelihood of all that. But let me reassure you - from a strict technology/operations/reliability/economics point of view a "home-made" solution (based on solid open-source tech) will be one order of magnitude better !
Look at Google and you will discover that they avoid the "commercial" solutions like the plague. They even roll their networking gear, because they don't like the Cisco and Checkpoint antics (e.g. "we don't give you the grammar of the Checkpoint rule language, as this is a Security By Obscurity Measure !").
Google is running hundreds of millions of customers on a MySQL Sharded Cluster. That means a hash function maps each email address onto one of 100 physical database servers. That means easy scaling.
..runs their Global Project List as an Excel Sheet. Any more questions ?
I used these guys at the small ISP I worked for (small, as in about 100 thousand end-users). I no longer work with them but have kept up with the guys via LinkedIn. They have full management solutions that should work for you guys, and they specialize in DOCSIS which should be a plus for you.
http://www.ibbs.com
the new Next Generation firewall do what the ISP is doing manually. It identifies and tracks and limits applications. SonicWALL can look at over 3800+ applications out of the box "WITHOUT GIVING UP PERFORMANCE"! (the rest of them give up security or performance)... plus with SonicWALL it appears you can add your own signatures for "home grown applications".
I work at a small ISP. We're a decade past your point, but our wired-building model means we're still sitting on less than 5000 customers. We run Ispconfig and use the commercial support while upgrading, that hosting server paid for itself many times over and continues to be great value to us. For network monitoring we started with mrtg on a solaris box, manually configured *shudder*. Since moving to JFFNMS we've been very happy with the network-monitoring side of things. I think you'd do well to follow other suggestions here looking for a suitable billing-system solution. Try not to focus on getting all these things in one, just make a internal webpage with links to all the respective systems.
Look into Inomial's Smile ( http://www.inomial.com/ We use it and it's better than Platypus somebody mentioned; might suit you.
+Raider of the lost BBS
The Dude is a great product, with 2 major shortcomings
1) Runs on windows
2) Has a terrible name when it comes to talking to senior managers about design decisions
Does anyone know a comparable product that runs on something a little more "servery" (i.e. linux)?
Honestly, if you are already performing all these tasks manually and have a "working system", you would likely be better off completing your build with scripting to finish automating all the processes and completing central data storage in a database package.
... Access may slow you down.
...very important these days when clients go *poof* easily).
1) Enlarge your Access system to encompass all functionality. I've written deeper managed systems in Access (and some are still in use, LOL) which is fully capable of handling all the necessary tasks with appropriate scripting. But when you get larger
2) Graduate to MSSQL and scripted applications moving your data. There are many different ways to approach this, of course, as virtually every application builder, language and script type speaks SQL in some fashion. But the concept of centralized data storage with scripts reaching in to accomplish tasks and interfaces allowing you to manually modify the data is hardly new. The advantage of MSSQL of course is that many users can access the data instead of a single workstation. Even if you "share" the DB file in Access you don't have a true multi-user system until you can all access it at one time and make concurrent changes (a good trick in Access, but normal in MSSQL).
3) Super-Graduate to MySQL and port the entire operation to a free licensing envinroment (otherwise the same description as MSSQL! LOL). In addition to the free licensing, the programmers available in the Linux world are fairly plentiful and do not (as a rule) expect to get $30k for each application. Just remember: Don't send money to a company you cannot sue until after you have your product. Especially to a location where $500 is two year's Salary and the programmer would do better economically to disappear with that money than actually build the application! I like "one piece at a time" small script building solutions. It builds a relationship between developer and client while providing useful results with smaller amounts. And keeps the developer busy with lots of little clients (so no single client can "shut down" the developer
All the above are assuming that scripted systems can modify what needs to be modified when conditions change. Also all assume you have knowledge of at least one language or scripting language to make these changes. Generally this sort of thing is handled one item at a time, starting with the most "work-hours-intense" piece (to recoup those man-hours as quickly as possible). This is something most IT shops do for clients on a daily basis: Automation. The fact that you ARE an IT shop does not make you immune from the need to have automation! LOL
I used to work for a company that developed software for this.. specifically cable modems, but it also has limited support for canopy and some DSLAMs. Check out www.ibbs.com and they have software only customers and also full service support, up to you. Not sure what the pricing looks like, but there were several customers with <100 subs when I worked there.
The most important aspect to make sure you get right? Billing. We use Platypus. Tucows owns them now. Still a good solution. We spend part of two days a month on billing. Not bad for around 400 customers. We take so few tech calls any effort to centralize management would be way more work than the benefit we would get.
"hundreds of thousands of dollars". A proper developer costs 100k per year. But the result will be much better than the commercialware crapola out there.
Wall Of Dells ?
..it "forgets" less than three customers out of 10000 per month ?
If you use Access instead of Postgres you are simply retarded or forced into this by your handlers.
MS SQL Express 2008/2010/2012 are much much better than Access.
It may be more than you want... but check out Freeside.
...Steve
Yes, it is called software integration. You will need yet another dude to make that happen.
I used to build ISP's for a living about 10 years ago. Large ones.
Settle on a database, develop your CRM and billing around that. Let your radius talk to the database. Pick your poison for monitoring and integrate that as well.
Step 3 would be profit...
While this is not exactly practical advice, it's the best advice I can give. For more practical advice, contact your local dude.
Get yourself a proper ticketing and CMDB system to track all the necessary user configuration.
Servicenow.com is a good SaaS option
Just a quick sanity check. I worked for several ISP's up through 2000. I've worked at Fortune 500 companies.
Big companies are management driven. Any solution they put forth could "fail" or miss the mark for 2-5 percent of their transactions but the one size fits all solutions work for them because it gives them something they can sell, justify or install. Imagine if you took their marketing staff or accounting office and spent 2 years designing a set of 100 forms that handle 99% of what they did. That would be a waste of time. But they don't see that when it comes to handling IT.
So don't take a page out of their book. Don't make a one size fits all solution. Make process that allows for no gaps and allows for audits, automated or otherwise.
In my experience if you can find the failure 80% of the time before the customer does you are doing AWESOME! Beyond that you are looking for fast problem resolution rates. Everything else falls into the 80/20 rule in that you are spending 80% of your remaining time for the additional 20% of effectiveness. Your management may want you to be completely replace-able and they will mask that with talk of documentation and process, but in the end your replacement will have to be 80% as good as you, and 120% as good as you to learn the additional products you may have had to learn based on management buying decisions. I've worn that hat. Start with inittabs (I'm a UNIX guy) and work your way through the network diagrams and hope nothing breaks before you can re-engineer and transition.
One of the comments I read laid it out pretty bare bones. A central database that has all of their relevant information coded in, with web page front ends for update and review. If you like MS Access I guess that works but I'm a UNIX/Linux admin. Give me an SQL or LDAP Database coded to their username or account number. I'd recommend an audit trail on the changes so if someone makes a mess you can hang it around their neck and/or revoke access. Even if the company makes a centralized database, use their unique key for account and key your own data on your own server with an audit trail. If you have no logs or audit trail you have no memory. That would be bad. How would you know they want isn't working today was removed per request and was there a mere hours or days prior?
You not only want the "1 ring to rule them all" (let's be honest, this is an ego thing) but you also want a central repository of configuration information so you can perform regular audits. If customer XYZ is supposed to have X bandwidth, and the following services, say email hosting, 5 email accounts, and 5 dedicated IP addresses once you have consolidated that data (not just notes in a big blurb of text but coded in with rules strict typing in the data base) then dust off your scripting handbook and perform some audits. The audit scripts I wrote saved my arse when I had to bring back everything starting with a "S" due to a recursive delete from someone that I hand removed from the passwd file. The audit script could then feed the create routines I had written and bring back the missing configurations. May you get to be that guy or better!
Only a centralized configuration database with audit/create scripts will let you fix things fast without doing it by hand.
In my book you will get cool points if you can audit 80-90% of what you are delivering to your customers to see if it's getting misconfigured or failing so you can fix it before they notice it, or at least ask the appropriate questions.
Enjoy being in the hot seat! I keep hoping I'd get the chance to engineer for an ISP again but that has never come to pass... *SIGH*
It was fun...
Well wishes to you!
You could use any of those two CRM's, with SugarCRM being more mature than X2Engine, as well as having a pretty good development studio built into the CRM. This allows you to create custom modules, with custom fields & forms. That's what you might use to manage equipment inventories for example.
You can also use hooks in the code, to call various API's to provision services. For example if a customer is assigned a new product, you can hook that event to make something happen in the real world.
If you don't have anyone skilled enough to do this, you can hire a developer to implement that for you. The advantage with this approach is that for very little money you will get a custom tailored solution. It will be so cheap that even if you throw the system away after 2 years, it's still worth it.
And as an aside, I can hook you up with such a team if you can't find one of your own :-)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
LAMP (yes, you want to mirror and backup that) and a dedicated dev or a couple will save their own salaries very soon. Been there, done that on a 10M+ turnover ISP.
Before our small ISP smalled-out, we were converting to FreeSide, a FOSSy sol'n, from WinNT-based Platypus. Had all the goods for user self-provisioning (RADIUS and such), billing, reporting; Nice perly hooks for places you needed a more custom fit.
Might be worth a look-see...
Why are they using MS Project in other projects then?
Seriously, just because you can manage a "ten item list" in an Excel sheet doesn't make it a proper tool for running a CRM with at least hundreds of users in it. If you want to use the CRM to manage modems, or at least IP traffic, you'll be looking at something special already. Managing services like e-mail, home pages and whatever else you choose to provide is is another thing.
I've spent ten in the last fifteen years or so working for ISPs and I haven't seen one that didn't have to do a lot of custom coding done on their CRM. The amount of money made or lost on a customer was usually related to the effectiveness of the CRM in automating tasks and the amount of money they wanted to spend on advertising. ISPs that had to spend time on manually administrating users due to lack of features or robustness of their CRM tended to bloat out of control regarding the number of people required to keep things going. Once you get above a certain number, the amount of middle management, HRM and whatnot to keep them functioning made it unprofitable for the ISPs to keep their operation running. The ones that focused on making their people work more effective lost the battle, the ones that off-shored their people are losing as we speak and the ones that focused on tech solutions are still in the black, despite their competition throwing lots of shareholder money at advertising and stealing their customer with unprofitable propositions.
Focusing on fixing this properly with tools that require as little as possible hands on is the thing to do here. Integration that means that you don't have to rewrite twenty applications if you add or change one proposition is crucial if you want to keep costs down and efficiency up. that saves you more money than having to fix something in a dozen places in a dozen languages and having no way to do a proper dev/test/accept/production environment will make changing propositions a nightmare. This will make you slow and expensive in a very competitive market.
If you do it right the first time, you get less complaining customers, which means less time and money spent on the phone helping them. It means you'll get a better reputation, which means you'll have to spend less on advertisement and can get away with asking a buck more per month than your competitor, with your customers stating they'll happily pay more because your service is so good.
Even though he'll most likely be trampled by some big ISP coming to his town some time in the future, the guy has a good point asking around for decent solutions. It's either that or go bankrupt from your own incompetence. All I can say is focus on your data model and make it extendable. Make sure that whatever proposition you're offering can keep on going next to new ones. Make sure that you can change taxes and fees with a starting date stamp and an ending date stamp somewhere in your database, so you can re-run billing runs and all that. Lots of ISPs I've seen didn't have this sort of functionality built in and were forced to change contracts with users, making them lose some of them, or had to run multiple instances of their CRM software because they couldn't adapt their software to a new law or proposition. To my knowledge, there is no ready made solution for this sort of thing, so pick best of breed tools for your management and ticketing systems and make sure you can glue them into your CRM in such a way that you can exchange them or add more tools without having to rewrite your core billing system. Once you have to rewrite your billing system or have to do manual stuff to keep everything in sync, you'll be looking at infinite monkeys on infinite typewriter style scenarios and those are lethal for lean-and-mean style ISPs.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
My opinion is that your requirements are unique, and any software package in existence will only do 80% of what you need. You have two choices - put together a couple of these 80% packages with some scripting glue, or write something bespoke from the bottom up. I would favour the former probably, since then when your programmer leaves you will have a better chance to get someone else who can easily find out how the whole thing works.
Korma: Good
We have several thousands of customers , most of them are using WiFi...we use RadiusManager + Mikrotik
Wait, I think I see your problem.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Anyone using access in a production environment and who relies on it in the core of their business, deserves to fail.
It's not terribly clear what exactly you're trying to accomplish, but have a good look at NetDisco (designed for college campuses, mostly for tracking MAC addresses & the devices that know about them) and NetDot (designed more generically for wide-area networks but not so much for tracking end stations). They're both excellent pieces of software that keep track of everything on your network for you in a clean multivendor way. I particularly like NetDot as it has the much-sought-after feature of a plugin framework that generates config files for the other tools you already use. Think of it as sort of a control panel/dashboard for your network management apps & you start to get the idea.
Without the time and resources to do it right the answer is simply no. You would have to write it on your own. I owned and operated a small ISP with dialup, DSL, and 4 different flavors of wireless. there exisits no central management tool. You're best bet is to find a decent customer front end product for billing, ticketing, etc probably a commericail product would be best. Then use open source products to monitor your network(s). Either way you will have to do some glueing together of things as state above using the APIs and scripting. It can be done, but by the time you plan, write, and implement, your production network will have changed and so will your requirements.
Having been in your shoes, the best method to manage the disparate systems (as other posters have mentioned here) is to roll your own solution if you have some coding experience. The forums at docsis.org have some decent information on what to poll via SNMP, etc. The wireless industry is still kind of the "Wild Wild West" when it comes to standardizing on what can be polled and what you should poll.
Also, if you're not already involved with them consider looking into the NCTC (nctconline.org) or WISPA (wispa.org), there are vendors with solutions in each area but not necessarily traversing both.
I worked for 2 different ISP's and I saw two different methods of trying to manage things. I was a member of the NOC so I saw both all to well. You can write something yourself and fit it to your needs or you can try to find something prepackaged.
If you go the custom route you'll want to make sure you have the time necessary to manage and maintain it. It will be a lot of overhead at first but as time moves on you can have other guys in your NOC do the updating. In my experience you write a simple perl script that pulls from a db of ip's and snmp logins and strings. This script runs every 3 - 5 minutes to poll snmp stats on your network. You createa PHP/CSS front end to display the data. You can do red for down, yellow for missed one poll and green for good. Obviously there's a lot more to the details than this. I built a bare bones system some years ago and I was able to pull data from every device and server off the network plus I could link back to Radius to grab time frame stats for logins to specific pieces of equipment. I also built a gtk2 tool that would run on my Linux desktop and notify me of problems and give me options for telnet, ssh, test service, etc.
If you go the prepackaged route you'll have to deal with making something else fit your needs. At one job we used Nagios. I had to write plugins for it to support things like counting domain blocks on our smtp server... I think it was a nightmare and was always more content with custom solutions. It's up to you though what you decide on. Everyone's got there needs and if you can write your own do it, if not use a prepacked freebie like Nagios to fill your needs.
I own a small provisioning company called RPM Provisioning Management (www.rpmcable.com) and offer DOCSIS and Wireless provisioning and monitoring software. I operate several very large wireless grids using StarOS and Mikrotik equipment. I don't have much experience with Canopy, but do have a lot of experience with Ubiquiti. We should be able to come up with an acceptable solution for you. Take a look at our site and shoot me an e-mail if you'd like some more information. Thanks and good luck!
From my POV, Platypus was a never ending nightmare of various implementation and migration problems, a horrifying fat client, and a basically worthless web app. Hopefully it's better now, since they're still in business, but it's not something I would recommend except for avoidance.
I suggest looking into the Bilt application: http://buildadatabaseapp.com/ It's a fairly easy to extend system built for creating adhoc shared database applications without having to write any code. You could use a bit of custom PHP on top of it to integrate into whatever public forms or whatever you need to pull data from. All your operators and employees would only need to interact with the UI provided by Bilt.
www.blueapples.org
If you have AAA capabilities try www.daloradius.com. Billing and AAA.
Azotel's SIMPLer system is a Subscriber Information Management PLatform for ISPs and WISPs. They provide Billing, CRM, Dashboard, Auto-Provisioning, End User Portal, Auto-Disconnect/reconnect, Bandwidth management, customer/site mapping with google earth, dispatch, ticketing, and much more. They are the global standard with operators located in 22 countries across 6 continents.
Products that come to mind: platypus visp.net azotel freeside powercode billmax
Try Wispmon at Wispmon.com. It does Customer Qualification, CRM, Provisioning, Monitoring, Trouble Ticketing, and Workorders. All in one hosted solution. It was designed by a WISP (wireless isp) after finding nothing to suit their needs.
Yes and no. Cable TV (excluding the communication back to the headend for VOD or SDV) is one way. This means the traffic flows to your home. HSI is two-way communications (your both recieving and sending). So tools that can look at the downstream certainly apply to Video & HSI however return is pretty much exclusive to the HSI side.
Take a look at Azotel
It is a fantastic package and gave me time to fish and spend
time with my family instead of living with my network.
Mitch
http://www.wispsolutions.com/wisp-products/azotel-simpler.html
There are three that do what you want... Azotel, Visp.net, and BillMax. There is also Freeside and Platypus... In one of your comments, I read that someone recommended Platypus because it worked in a previous ISP, but you discounted it for a total solution because you already have a billing method in place. You should look at how to automate ALL of your operation so your employees are more affective in building your customer base.
We are a small Wireless ISP also.. you might want to look into joining WISPA as what you have asked is constantly changing and you might want a good knowledge base of other people doing what you are doing. ISPs range from 0 customers to 150k customers... Good group.
There are many programs out there that commercial WISPS use that can scale from small to large. I like Patronsoft FirstSpot for Hotspot and sub-500 user systems. Then there is Azotel and Powercode for bigger ones. Read "Tales from the Towers" if you want to know more about the industry at
http://www.triadwireless.net/tales-from-the-towers or www.muniwireless.com
Take a look at Wispmon. It does Wireless Customer Qualification, CRM, Provisioning with any equipment, workorders, trouble tickets, billing (recurring and usage based), and has mobile apps that provide utilities to your field techs. It was designed by a couple of guys who ran a WISP for 8 years to solve just the problem you are having. www.wispmon.com
are you thinking of outsourcing the job?