Managing Large Deployments with the Soracom User Console
Written by: Steve Hardy
Published: November 23, 2021
Sometimes it seems like the difficulty of managing your deployment can scale alongside it. As additional devices, SIMs, and contributors are added to a project, it can be easy for small details to go overlooked until they become a symptom of a larger issue. Fortunately, when deploying with Soracom, users have the ability to leverage our wide variety of services to monitor for issues, analyze them once they are apparent, and automate behavior to address them in the future.
The Subscribers List
When entering the Soracom User Console, you are immediately presented with a categorized list of your SIM Subscribers. The displayed columns in this list are user-customizable, allowing you to create a view of the tags that are most relevant to your deployment. In addition, custom tag values and columns can be added to the existing list. If a particular SIM needs to be found quickly, all of the values and tags are searchable in the table.
The Subscriber Details Dashboard
While some users may be comfortable with retrieving all relevant data for their subscribers in JSON format then parsing it to more readable CSVs or dashboards, creating these scripts can take time and effort from engineers. With the Soracom User Console’s GUI, information can be easily found and presented in a digestible format for any SIM in your project, including historical data usage, cell location, local SIM information, and any tags or watcher rules you have created. These user-configurable tags are searchable within the console as well and are a great way to keep track of SIMs located in a certain geographic region. Watcher rules for individual SIMs can alert you via email of a customizable data threshold and automatically downgrade a SIM’s speed class when this occurs. More advanced automation of this variety can also be achieved using Soracom’s Event Handler.
Soracom Event Handler
An extremely valuable feature that Soracom includes for free is the ability to script action to be taken when your account, a group of SIMs, or an individual SIM meets a variety of conditions. With Event Handler, you can build automations based on SIM events, such as when a SIM’s status changes or when its data usage exceeds a particular threshold, in order to send email notifications, throttle, or disable a SIM, execute a webhook, and so on. Event handlers can be applied to a single subscriber, a SIM that contains one or more subscriptions, a group of SIMs, or to all SIMs in your account. With these easy automations, less time can be spent manually monitoring an existing deployment, letting you dedicate freed-up resources to other tasks.
Group Level Settings in the Soracom User Console
Many of Soracom’s features can be configured at the group level, preventing repetitive copying of settings between your subscribers. Changed the domain for your data server? If you directed your SIMs to use Soraocm’s Unified Endpoint a single field in your group’s settings can be changed to instantly redirect all of your devices. Need easy integration to your AWS IoT dashboard for the new SIMs you purchased? Simply add them to your already configured Funnel group and immediately have them adopt the proper settings!
API Integration with the Soracom User Console
All User Console features are built on top of the public Soracom API. If there is a particular feature or data point in the Soracom API that you would like to use in your own custom dashboard or controls application you can retrieve it programmatically by using the relevant call. More information on the Soracom API can be found in our API reference documents.
SIM Lifecycle Management
The Soracom User Console also offers a bevy of tools to better manage the lifecycle of your deployed SIMs. Check out this video to learn more.
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