Cisco Control Center is the sim management system that Thingsdata mainly uses to monitor and manage the IoT connectivity of devices on a large scale. The sim management system automatically provides the control and visibility organizations need to deploy their IoT devices (local or global). The Cisco sim management system is suitable for different implementations and business structures. Customers can protect devices from breaches and unauthorized access. In this article we will discuss a number of basic functionalities of the Cisco sim management system.
Simcards overview
If you are going to apply the Cisco sim management system to your IoT solutions, you will use the device overview the most. It offers a clear and concise overview of all your simcards. The overview consists of several columns with specific information. Here you can see how much data your simcard has used in the past month, or what the status of your simcard is (activated, activation ready, deactivated) and whether it is ‘in session’.
With the advanced search and filter option you can easily find everything and also group it. The overview can also be arranged according to your own taste so that all the information that applies to you is visible. You also have access to five freely customisable fields per simcard to process customer information. You can export all your data from the overview to an Excel file. You can also perform a batch update to enrich and change the data of a large amount of simcards.
You can of course view each simcard individually. The following information can be found here, among other things: the ICCID number, the provided IP address and the MSISDN number. Here you have insight into the connection history of your simcard, where you can see when and on which operator your simcard has used DATA, SMS or VOICE. The status of your simcard can be adjusted independently. It is therefore possible to activate and possibly deactivate your simcards yourself. Incidentally, the simcards have an automatic activation.
Diagnosis and spotlight
You can also see whether your simcard is connected (register and connect) to a network. If there is no connection, you can see what could be the cause. A test to see if there is a correct radio connection can be done by sending a test SMS to the simcard and the device. If there is a good radio connection, the test SMS will be delivered directly to the device. If there is no radio connection, the test SMS remains on ‘pending’. You can then perform a send cancel location, this will reboot the simcard and make it try to reconnect to the network. Although you don’t want the connection to the network to be interrupted, you can initially run a send POD (Packet of Disconnect). A send POD terminates the current session without interrupting the connection to the network.
Accounts
If you become a customer of Thingsdata, you will receive your own account for the Cisco sim management system. The user CUSTOMERADMIN is created for this account. As a CUSTOMERADMIN you have access to all functionalities that you as a customer can use. With CUSTOMERADMIN rights you can also create new user profiles for your colleagues, such as CUSTOMERUSER and CUSTOMERREADONLY. You can divide the users over different customer accounts grouped under the main account, so that different branches or end customers only see the simcards that apply to them. Subdividing simcards can be extremely useful if you use multiple applications that are linked to different data bundles or if you want to allocate the costs per branch or end customer.
Automation rules
With the automation rules of the Cisco sim management system you can guarantee the reliability of the service and get a grip on the costs. You can create different types of automation rules. A few examples: with the IMEI lock functionality you can ensure that your simcards can only be used in combination with the specific IMEI number of your device. If a simcard detects a different IMEI number, it will automatically block and can no longer be abused. You can also receive a notification if too much data is being used on one of your simcards, whereby you set the threshold for the level of consumption yourself. With this ‘cycle to data usage’ rule you have an email sent to yourself or to your support department, to which action can be taken.
An automation rule that only Thingsdata can create for you is if your simcard has not used DATA, SMS or VOICE for a certain period of time, then we can automatically transfer this simcard from activated to activation ready. If the status is activation ready and the simcard has this status for a full calendar month, it will not appear on your invoice.
API
The Cisco sim management system also allows you to use an application programming interface (API). With this API you can edit and open data (value fields) from the sim management system with an external application. You can perform multiple tasks using the API via the web interface of the Cisco sim management system. Some of the features that can be applied with the API include sending messages to simcards and managing the life cycle of a simcard.
If you would like a non-binding introduction to the Cisco sim management system, where one of our technical employees will guide you through the Cisco sim management system, please contact us via telephone number 085-0443500 or by email to info@thingsdata.com.