O.N.T. Monitoring

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muppet

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#2228341 1-May-2019 09:04

ANglEAUT:

muppet: ... Personally, I don't think you should try and monitor the ONT.

Personally, I can see a reason to monitor the ONT. 🤩

Out of band monitoring

Relying on the medium that you are monitoring to report a fault is flawed

Sometimes, you do need visual confirmation &
Is a person present to confirm the red light & do a reboot?

🤪 It's been a while since I read the beginning of this thread, but I seem to remember that point 3 does not apply in this case. 😜

Yea my "joke" was that I'd just moaned 50 people had said the same thing, then I went and said the same thing.

I agree, I can see why you'd want to monitor the ONT. It's an interesting idea, I've been trying to think how to do it too.

chevrolux

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#2228353 1-May-2019 09:26

ANglEAUT:

muppet: ... Personally, I don't think you should try and monitor the ONT.

Personally, I can see a reason to monitor the ONT. 🤩

Out of band monitoring

Relying on the medium that you are monitoring to report a fault is flawed

Sometimes, you do need visual confirmation &
Is a person present to confirm the red light & do a reboot?

🤪 It's been a while since I read the beginning of this thread, but I seem to remember that point 3 does not apply in this case. 😜

But if it's a business situation, you should always be looking for the SUPPORTED options. In NZ, monitoring the ONT by the consumer is simply not supported by any of the LFC's.

So if it's an unattended site that needs to be highly available, you would look towards a router that supported perhaps a cellular connection so you got true "out of band" monitoring.

As a Telecom linesman (only 7-8 years ago now), going around all the local exchanges and installing dial-up connections to ISP's UCLL equipment stacks. These are buildings with more fibre than you could imagine. But the point was to have a totally separate medium for connecting to the gear should the worst happen.

Even if you were "monitoring" the ONT, what happens when the physical fibre link goes down? Your monitoring info isn't going anywhere. You need another method to get that info out. So in which case, you may as well just monitor the PPPoE connection, or even the physical port if you want. Because if it's the fibre link that is down, you have to call your ISP anyway to get it fixed. So the workflow would be
1) "Alert: PPPoE for Site1 down"
2) Confirmed, can't access that site through main connection.
3) Connect via "out of band" connection. Yep, main connection is down.
4) Power cycle the ONT (using your power supply's network capabilities which you have of course because this is a serious network)
5) Wait 5 min. PPPoE still not up
6) Call ISP, they confirm fibre link down (because they can see the difference between an ONT being turned off and a fibre down using the Chorus tools just FYI)
7) Fibre is down, ISP has a logged a fault. Now we wait for a tech.

All done in less than 15 minutes without any "ONT monitoring"

BarTender

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#2228603 1-May-2019 11:52

chevrolux:

But if it's a business situation, you should always be looking for the SUPPORTED options. In NZ, monitoring the ONT by the consumer is simply not supported by any of the LFC's.

So if it's an unattended site that needs to be highly available, you would look towards a router that supported perhaps a cellular connection so you got true "out of band" monitoring.

As a Telecom linesman (only 7-8 years ago now), going around all the local exchanges and installing dial-up connections to ISP's UCLL equipment stacks. These are buildings with more fibre than you could imagine. But the point was to have a totally separate medium for connecting to the gear should the worst happen.

Even if you were "monitoring" the ONT, what happens when the physical fibre link goes down? Your monitoring info isn't going anywhere. You need another method to get that info out. So in which case, you may as well just monitor the PPPoE connection, or even the physical port if you want. Because if it's the fibre link that is down, you have to call your ISP anyway to get it fixed. So the workflow would be
1) "Alert: PPPoE for Site1 down"
2) Confirmed, can't access that site through main connection.
3) Connect via "out of band" connection. Yep, main connection is down.
4) Power cycle the ONT (using your power supply's network capabilities which you have of course because this is a serious network)
5) Wait 5 min. PPPoE still not up
6) Call ISP, they confirm fibre link down (because they can see the difference between an ONT being turned off and a fibre down using the Chorus tools just FYI)
7) Fibre is down, ISP has a logged a fault. Now we wait for a tech.

All done in less than 15 minutes without any "ONT monitoring"

Since you're serious about it you would also want

1.1) Take photo using CCTV camera of Router & ONT with timestamp

3.1) Email / pxt photo using out of band mobile connection, or if you have a Private APN or reverse tunnel over Mobile data you can come in remotely. Or have a DSL connection as a backup to the UFB.

3.2) Migrate connection to 4G with rate limited / restricted service to have minimum viable services for the site

The two issues I have with this are all dependent on the type of outage you are having.

1) A planned or unplanned outage from the ISP/RSP. Such as when they are upgrading the BNGs at 3am and everyone drops their connection and it comes back 15 mins later or if the BNG has a hardware fault. What is the frequency of these events occurring vs the cost to implement the above solution. Typically these outages will be more frequent but they will be planned so the outage time will be short and service would automatically restore after the upgrade.

2) A planned or unplanned outage from the LFC such as when a fibre cut occurs. I think similar to the planned RSP outage they will be less frequent as the LFCs don't do upgrade cycles as frequently as the RSPs. And if there is a fibre cut it would be a fair bet that both fixed and mobile services would be impacted. In this situation there is *literally* nothing that can be done short of having a Satellite backup as everyone in the local area.

So I really wonder on the cost to implement such a HA/DR solution vs the frequency a redundant connection would be required. As having a redundant mobile with a sufficient data plan or Private APN otherwise having a DSL connection isn't cheap long term for something that may happen once a year or even less frequently.

So again.... Why?

Tracer

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#2231860 6-May-2019 18:31

If there's no point monitoring the ONT, why does it have LEDs on the front?

muppet

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#2231862 6-May-2019 18:35

Tracer:

If there's no point monitoring the ONT, why does it have LEDs on the front?

sbiddle

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#2231864 6-May-2019 18:37

Tracer:

If there's no point monitoring the ONT, why does it have LEDs on the front?

If we could understand why the OP wants to monitor the ONT then we'd be able to answer your question...

Monitoring the ONT won't help in any way with the LEDs - which show 10/100/1000 status, whether the optical is up or not and most importantly whether the power is up. Somehow "monitoring" the ONT won't show any of these things.

hio77

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#2231865 6-May-2019 18:40

If monitoring the ont is really a requirement.

May be worth finding an ISP that will present the relative data to you?
Chorus have a wealth of data they monitor that is avaliable to providers.

Much like others I still don't quite see the business case for it.

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chevrolux

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#2231885 6-May-2019 19:18

Tracer:
If there's no point monitoring the ONT, why does it have LEDs on the front?

So end users can perform tier 1 fault finding with their ISP.

hio77

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#2231984 6-May-2019 21:22

chevrolux:
Tracer:

If there's no point monitoring the ONT, why does it have LEDs on the front?

So end users can perform tier 1 fault finding with their ISP.

until they get the gen 3 ont, accidentally press the turn lights off button and go to the rep

"THERE IS ONLY ONE LIGHT!!"

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

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