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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.
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!”
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.
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...
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!
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.
Edit: Specifically, NDS (before being bought by cisco) had bought a company that specializes in just this sort of thing.
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.
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!
Small ISP, and you dont even imagine the number of small mid companies governed on an excel sheet with the balance on cell A11 with green or red.
"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.
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.
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
Like most software and cars (Lada) coming from Russia, it looks like it was made sometime in the early 90's...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
MS SQL Express 2008/2010/2012 are much much better than Access.
It may be more than you want... but check out Freeside.
...Steve
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...
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
And this screams: "Citation needed".
Wait, I think I see your problem.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good idea, I wouldn't touch it with a borrowed bargepole.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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
Yeah, ours had the bottom line in N25, not A11.
And I worked for more than one multi-million dollar company that used Quicken or Quickbooks, which isn't much better than a spreadsheet.
Learn to love Alaska
Products that come to mind: platypus visp.net azotel freeside powercode billmax
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 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?