Operationally speaking I sure think you're right. In a perfect world
all people would have burial power and fiber, too.
Since the dollar (or bitcoin) speaks a lot louder than my server can
beat up your server, people are going to choose one over the other.
If you don't mind it's cloud based, Sonar is a great choice. If you
don't want to do cloud based, find something else or deal with it ;)
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 10:04 AM, Simon Westlake <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
One final thing to add here is that both Cameron and I have dealt
with this for many years, so it's not like our objections are
philosophical, they are based in the constant reality we had to
deal with. I'm going to end with one story about an issue I spent
a long time troubleshooting that is my goto when people ask me
what the difference is.
In a previous job, I once had a customer who would have their
billing randomly fail in the middle on seemingly random nights.
They believed there were all kinds of different factors
contributing to it, but all I would see in the billing logs were
that billing just stopped at some point, and then later on, there
would be seemingly unrelated errors hours later. After looking at
these for a while, I came to the conclusion that something must be
hanging the billing process on this customers server, and then
when it came back to life hours later, things started failing due
to disconnected SQL connections, etc.
So I start digging through and trying to correlate the customers
that it fails on. Did they all have some kind of special event
happening? Were they in some group that was triggering a
background process that caused a failure? Was it bad memory, or
some kind of CPU issue? I was dredging through dmesg, syslog, the
billing logs, everything I could find, and nothing added up. So I
added a ton of logging to the billing process and pushed a patched
version to the server. It didn't happen again for days, but when
it did, all my logging would stop at the same time - it was like
the whole billing process was just seizing. So I started putting
external logging in. Was cron killing something, was some external
process like MySQL locking up? Waited days again, and looked at
the logs - everything was puking. So then I start thinking, it
must be some kind of hardware error, but I really don't like to go
to a customer and say 'your server is broken' when I don't have
any evidence. I spent a lot more time reading Stack Overflow,
looking for examples of other people having these kinds of
problems, until eventually I had to tell them 'I just can't figure
it out. It seems like your server is completely freezing. Do you
have any monitoring in place that you can look at, or can you call
me right when it happens so I can SSH in and take a look?'
Customer says, 'What server?'
I say, the server your system is running on.
Customer says, 'Oh. It's not on a server. I'm running it in a VM
on my laptop.'
Me: ...
'Yeah, I just close the lid at night when I'm done working and go
home.'
On 10/18/2017 8:51 AM, Cameron Crum wrote:
We did do a couple of on-prem installations for people, but there
were always issues and plenty of finger pointing at times. When
the customer's server reboots in the middle of a billing run who
gets the blame, and how are we, as the software provider, even
supposed to be aware of it? Am I now responsible for setting up
external monitoring processes just because you don't understand
or aren't comfortable with cloud based services? It's hard to
defend yourself against things like that even though the answer
seems obvious. Also, on prem people want the same level of
support, but also a discount because you don't have to host it
anymore. The truth is, most of the time, the on-prem guys require
more support, not less. Tracking down a problem and trying to
determine if it was the software's fault or the hardware's fault
is time consuming. We won't have easy access to server logs and
other diagnostic tools, and time spent acquiring that data means
more support hours. Support, as in man-hours, cost a lot more
than hosted servers. And to be clear, Wispmon didn't go out of
buisiness. We were approached by Sonar for an acquisition and it
was a good deal for all involved. Nobody from Wispmon was or will
be left high and dry. We, at Sonar, are working hard to ensure
transitions are as smooth and hands off on the customer end as
possible. With that, have a good day, I have a lot of data to move ;)
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 8:22 AM, Mike Hammett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
IIRC, version 3 you could have some of their services (not
billing) on-prem. Version 4 had an on-prem ability, due to
the very reasons I stated... a VM on your host is no
different than a VM on my host from an OS\application
perspective.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Josh Luthman" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent: *Wednesday, October 18, 2017 8:20:17 AM
*Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Wispmon was cloud only wasn't it?
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340 <tel:%28937%29%20552-2340>
Direct: 937-552-2343 <tel:%28937%29%20552-2343>
1100 Wayne St
<https://maps.google.com/?q=1100+Wayne+St+Suite+1337+Troy,+OH+45373&entry=gmail&source=g>
Suite 1337
<https://maps.google.com/?q=1100+Wayne+St+Suite+1337+Troy,+OH+45373&entry=gmail&source=g>
Troy, OH 45373
<https://maps.google.com/?q=1100+Wayne+St+Suite+1337+Troy,+OH+45373&entry=gmail&source=g>
On Oct 18, 2017 9:16 AM, "Josh Reynolds"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
He always has a choice.
On Oct 18, 2017 7:14 AM, "Matt Hoppes"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
He didn't have a choice. His cloud-based billing
provider went out of business and sold to sonar. So
he doesn't even really have the option of running old
software, he's being forced to upgrade.
On Oct 18, 2017, at 07:55, Josh Reynolds
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
Please don't become a Sonar customer just to
demonize them because you don't like their
service model.
Seriously. That'd be a super shitty thing to do.
On Oct 18, 2017 6:52 AM, "Mike Hammett"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I will be using it shortly as Sonar bought
WISPMon.
All of the major billing\OSS platforms with
modern features are also cloud-based, so
there's not really anywhere else to go.
That's fine for you that it works that way,
but many WISPs are increasing their use of
on-premises virtualization. What about your
monitoring, DNS, RADIUS, syslog, Unimus,
mail, etc., etc. servers?
Yes, my reasons do outweigh arbitrary reasons
to keep it in a cloud environment.
Actually, I've been fairly quiet on this
particular issue and will be increasing my
advocacy efforts in this regard to all
billing\OSS platforms. As I said, it's the
SFP port of the billing\OSS world.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
<http://www.ics-il.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
Midwest Internet Exchange
<http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
The Brothers WISP
<http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Darin Steffl"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent: *Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:08:47 PM
*Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
I'm in agreement with Simon that it's much
faster and reliable to host in the cloud than
a server on site. It would cost me many more
hours, hand holding, and worry if I had to
host this server in my network. If I went on
vacation and something happened, I'd be
stressed.
With sonar living in the cloud, there's less
to worry about as it's hosted in a much more
reliable datacenter than I could afford to
build. It's also managed by sonar's team so
if there's an issue, they take care of it.
Stress free for me.
I see why you might want to host it in house
but those reasons do NOT outweigh all the
benefits of letting sonar host it in the
cloud for you and take care of the problems.
Mike, if you don't like Simon's decision to
leave it in the cloud, shut up and move on.
There's no reason for you and Matt Hoppes to
keep beating a dead horse and sound like a
broken record. Use something else you're
happy with and let the rest of us grow our
business and make more $ while you two
complain about a product you don't even use.
Jeez ha
On Oct 17, 2017 8:31 PM, "Seth Mattinen"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/17/17 6:14 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Expect repeated harassment until a
good reason is presented or you
capitulate.
It's the SFP of the billing\OSS world.
I always welcome my competitors to have
external dependencies. When they try to
hand wave their problems away as vendor
or cloud problems it helps me gain new
customers.
~Seth
--
Simon Westlake
Email:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Phone:(702) 447-1247 <tel:%28702%29%20447-1247> US /(780) 900-1180
<tel:%28780%29%20900-1180> CA
---------------------------
Sonar Software Inc
The future of ISP billing and OSS
https://sonar.software
