Hi Team,
We’ve had a request brought to our attention that could be useful to many users.
Essentially what we’d like to see is an email notification when a cellular modem switches active SIMs.
This would help in failover situations to limit the use of the failover SIM. As is, the only way to know is to Check IC2, the device directly, or wait for the bill. We thought Maybe we could use the WAN disconnect, or Device offline notification, but the device reconnects too fast to be considered offline, and the WAN disconnect/connect alert did not work in testing either (I’m assuming because there was no remaining WAN to report the event to IC2).
Please let us know if this a SIM failover alert is something that could be added. If this is already in the works and there is a tentative ETA, that would be great as well.
For gas and oil companies that are using the cell modems for SCADA… they need to know when to re-point the data gathering software to a different IP address when it fails over
@FrontierComputerCorp, can you elaborate more on this? We are interested on the used case.
when a SCADA group is polling gas meters on a static IP address, and that SIM fails… they need to be notified that the failover has happened so they know to poll the meters using the new IP of the SIM in slot 2… or it will look like there is a COMPLETE NETWORK down situation…(This just happened to us last week…gas company thought 20+ meters were down)
also, when it goes back to the preferred SIM they need to know that
Notification might not be important for people using these for network connectivity from the inside out… but for people using these for M2M connections to devices that are getting to them via port forwarding they need to make sure they are polling the correct IP address
IE preferred sim is 107.34.x.12 and the device behind it is at 107.34.x.12:8056
when that SIM fails to the secondary SIM the IP address is now 166.104.x.102 and the device can be reached at 166.104.x.102:8056…
It would be NICE and actually pretty important for the Polling group to be advised of the change so they can redirect the polling engine as soon as possible
Hello @FrontierComputerCorp & @MRW-CRS,
We have two systems we use for this to cover the situations of IPs changing with WANs:
#1 is Peplink’s SpeedFusion managed by InControl2
#2 is DYN’s Managed DNS (Enterprise grade DDNS servces)
Have you looked at using either of these?
Happy to Help,
Marcus 
to clarify this is IP changing with SIM Failover only… there is no other WAN connection accept cellular
not sure they would want to add a managed DNS service and the cost of it…it would be better, I think, to just have a email notice of the change
Hello @MRW-CRS,
There are another two ways, both involve email notifications that you can use to trigger events with using scripting:
#1 Peplink InControl2 can give email notifications when and event is detected such as a WAN change.
#2 The MAX Router can send email notifications from within the router if you set it up (we use our companies business google account for this).
Do you need instructions/guidance on how to set these up?
Happy to Help,
Marcus
will a fail over in the SIM trigger a WAN change??? If ti goes down and comes back up 5 minutes later on teh same sim it is not a huge deal
the triggers are (it would be nice to have a SIM fail over email)
WAN Up / Down
PepVPN / SpeedFusion Up / Down
IPsec VPN Up / Down
Bandwidth Usage
LAN Port Up / Down
AirProbe Alarms
ContentHub Storage Alarms
Configuration Changes Applied
SIM Card Insertion / Removal
If there is a way to get a notice when the SIMs failover, please post the directions
Hello @MRW-CRS,
I’m not sure how your SIM will work with your local carriers, though here in Australia it is almost impossible to get a Static IP on a SIM, you can get a Public IP, though it will be dynamic and can change anywhere from every minute to a over a week, this is were SpeedFusion or using a service that supports Dynamic DNS helps to automate changing IP address access.
With the devices, you can rename the WAN connections to something more meaningful and unique names such as FibreService#470315, SIM#469275. This information will come though then in the email alerts and logs.
I will leave details on triggers to be answered by another colleague.
Happy to Help,
Marcus
@mldowling
Thank you for the suggestion given. That would be a great idea to monitor the WANs status via Device level notification.
@MRW-CRS @FrontierComputerCorp
Guessing this is on single cellular WAN with redundant SIM card deployment that customer need to know the SIM slot connected info.
For device firmware version 7.1.0 onward, we have enhance the device event logs to include the SIM slot connected info. Below are the sample event logs shown:
WebAdmin Event Logs:
IC2 WAN Event logs:
Email Notification In IC2 Cloud
- Just having a discussion with Engineering team , do you think the connected SIM slot info embedded in the Cellular WAN Up notification sufficient for your use case ?
to clarify - all our deployments are with Static IP’s… since our customers are using software to monitor gas flow and pressure (etc) on gas wells it would be impossible to keep up with changing (dynamic IP’s)
can we set up a notification based on event logs
Peplink Team - Email noticifcation based on SIM failover would be helpful for many customers and we suggest adding to the roadmap.
Thanks, Mike
@FrontierComputerCorp and @MRW-CRS
Yes, Engineering team is looking and considering the request. We need input from you guys on the notification email content that would help for your use case.
Below is the sample for the current version email notification for “WAN UP”:
Do you think by embedded the SIM slot info into the above “WAN UP” notification is good enough?
Example (For Reference Only):
“Pepwave MAX BR1 Mini” - MAX_BR1_4C05 (2933-20E9-4C05) - Connected to T-Mobile (SIM A) on 2018-01-02 17:14
Or you are totally looking for a new email notification email with different email subject line?
I would love to see it say “MAX-BR1-Mini-XYZ is now connected VIA SIM slot 2 166.123.234.23” or “MAX-BR1-Mini-XYZ has failed over to 166.x.x.x”