We have prizm and I've reached the piont where its time to cut my losses and move on. I've been using "The Dude" which is an amazing little program and I'll continue to use it to monitor my towers, but I need something that can be used for programming canopy. Mainly for setting bandwidth plans, etc. Something in the "free" range would be preffered.

So, what do you guys use?

35 views and no replies? Am I the only one monitoring?

We monitor our network with IpSwitch Whats Up Gold, but all Canopy provisioning and management we do via Prizm (450-ish SMs, 35 APs)

We monitor all of the network with The Dude.

Does whats up gold automatically add subs when they register to an AP or do you manually add them?

we use whatsup gold also,

we rigged it to monitor all of our SMs when we hook them up, simply tell it to monitor your entire IP range that you set your SMs too, might want to make sure your customers use a diffrent range, all of our SMs are on a 10.10/16 net with our APs and the customers are given a public ip with no route between to the two network works, we also enable nat on all of our SMs to stop anyone from getting into the network controls.

we set the SM mac address to get a 10.10 from the server via dhcp and the same dhcp server will give the customers a public ip :)

We use WhatsUpGold for infrastructure monitoring and paging only. We do not monitor SMs or other CPE at all as it is far too much of a hassle (people turn radios off constantly).

We as well do not monitor SM's. We only monitor core network devices (ie. switches, routers, ap, bh's etc..)

Occasional we use the NMS to monitor a problem SM in order to keep track of down time and latency spikes.

Nagios to monitor and report core network outages
Cacti to monitor signal, jitter, traffic, errors and pps on all devices.

We use Servers Alive to monitor all of our BH, CMM, AP, SM, UPS and other network components. It works very well for uptime notifications.

We currently have a W2K3 Standard Server running Softperfect Bandwidth Manager application that we use to regulate up/down speeds on our customers. We have created individual rules for each client's routable IP and then we can observe usage and set speeds on customers individually. Furthermore, we also have created groups and then added customers to specific groups based on the plans we sell them. We can set the up/down bandwidth on the group and then it automatically changes it for everyone in that group in realtime.

A couple other nice things you can do with Softperfect product are that you can give http access to individual clients so they can see their usage history in a web page. We try to throttle our customers after 2gb/day of transfer, so if we have a heavy user we give them a link to look at their transfer so they can self regulate. You can also create a group that will do a port 80 redirect and then you can setup IIS on the box and then create a landing page in IIS to redirect your "non-paying" or "declined" customers to that says something like "We have had a problem processing your payment. Please call our office to update your payment information on file." This really saves a ton of time each month not having to call a client if their payment declines (we have auto recurring billing for our clients). You just go into bandwidth mgr and put them in the payment decline group and then all their web (port 80) traffic is redirected to your landing page, so they are unable to surf the web until they update their payment info.

We got setup as a "reseller" with softperfect and paid like $75 for a single server license and we have over 300 customers running through it for $75. It takes a little while to setup on the front end, but is very easy to maintain afterward and has an awesome pricepoint.

Feel free to hit me back if you have any other questions about either of the two.

Custcomp

Would this bandwidth manager be able to handle 1500+ customers?

You setup a bridge on the server, so my guess is if you put in two solid gigabit nic's and if you had a robust server with good processors and ram, you should probably do ok.

Here's my thought though...

If you have 1,500 customers, why the heck are you trying to do it on the "cheap"? If I had 1,500 customers, I would be using much better. I looked at a product a while back that will do bandwidth shaping, support ticketing, recurring billing, provisioning, etc. and it works on a proprietary hardware router device. It was through http://www.solutions4ebiz.com and the product was call "Powercode". We charge a base rate of $40/mo., so at 1,500 subscribers, we would have a monthly gross revenue of about $60,000, and if you cannot afford a good robust management solution at $720,000/yr. in gross revenue, then something's wrong bro.

:-)

Custcomp

I only wish the math worked out that nicely for me :-).
Thanks for the info though, i'll look into it.

I think you will like that program if you are looking for just good bandwidth control and preset u/l speeds based on plans you sell.

Let me know if I can help at all once you get it implemented. They have a free 30 day full functional demo you can run to test it out.

Custcomp

Is this the product you're referring too?

http://powercode.com/