Hi All,
Looking for advice here and maybe some further discussion 
Background
We have an ever growing infrastructure (250+) of routers that we monitor and mange for clients and also supply/hire ourselves which back on to a vast network of Fusion Hubs (40+ across 3 VM provider platforms UK wide)
The one thing that all of these have in common is that we provide UK / European roaming
MultiNet SIM cards and a lot of these are on data limited contracts.
Our idea is to create a dashboard that will provide a single point of view that will allow us to see the data usage of all of our routers on an daily basis and historical data for as far back as we can go.
Wondering if anyone has attempted to connect into the IC2 API to pull this kind of data out and if it successful? Do not really want to pursue a direction if it is going to be problematic un the long run.
I think we can break this down into 3 areas:
- The Dashboard - Build one from scratch or out of the box ready (which one?)
- The API / Data - Extract the data needed at intervals and store this data somewhere
- Reporting - Notifications on data breach thresholds so we can notify clients.
I have looked at IC2 but cannot see anything out of the box in reporting that will satisfy the above needs.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated and anything we produce we aim to share with the community so that others can benefit too.
Regards,
Ozzie
SimpliWiFi
Hi Ozzie,
IC2 is pretty good at this. Are you using SIM reports yet? You can track usage by IMSI or ICCID per SIM or across a group of SIMs when using Data pools from MVNOs like Jola.
Lots of partners have built their own in house systems for this - anything is possible with the IC2 API really.
1 Like
Hi Martin,
No I will look into this, this is exactly what we are doing at the moment in terms of data pools as we have over 1000 sim cards in the wild at any one time.
You can imagine keeping an eye on the data usage for these manually is getting time consuming so we are looking at a way to get as much of this automated as possible.
One of the issues we have is a lot of the router kits we hire out go to the Film and TV sector so data usage is high but over a very short period of time. Will the reports you talk about be flexible enough to handle something like this and not like other reports where the data usage is based on a month i.e. you allocate 32GB for the month and that’s it.
Our kits can be hired out multiple times in a single month each with the data allocations being reset for each hire.
Monitoring for our clients fixed in place routers will be straight forward enough.
Off to have a play with the reports.
Ozzie
Hi Martin,
Have had a look at SIM Reports and while this would do what we need in terms of daily reporting it is still, from what I can see, a manual process and can not be automated i.e. sent out daily via email for example.
I think we need to go down the custom dashboard route to get what we need, off to jump into that rabbit hole of which dashboard.
Wish me luck 
Ozzie
Custom Dashboards are fun! Best of luck - and do share what you manage to build here - we’d love to see!
To clarify though, the trick is to build SIM Pools - a pool might be a single SIM you want to monitor or 100 SIMS from the same provider - whatever makes sense for the way your bandwidth allowance is allocated by your network operator.
You can then set a bandwidth allowance, three levels of usage notification ( I like 50% 70% and 90% personally), and then you can set email addresses to notify when those usage levels are reached.
I’ve seen people send those notifications to service desks to generate tickets / reports and to end customers as a heads up.
The beauty is that you can also set hard limits where when data allowance has been reached, the SIM stops routing user traffic but still lets you send InControl traffic to and from the device - so you can still manage it.
1 Like
Hi Martin,
This would definitely work for our fixed data clients and yes sending them to our NOC helpdesk is exactly what we will do.
I think we will still need to come back to a dashboard solution for our estate of routers that we hire out as I am not sure if the pooled sim setup will work in this case, not saying I won’t give it a go
Regards,
Ozzie
SimpliWiFi
