DOs and DONTs for small ISP

[ww at styx.org (William Waites)]

On 06/03, Mel Beckman wrote:
> Iâ??m constantly amazed at the number of even medium-sized ISPs that have no
> network monitoring. An NMS should go in as the first software component â??
> before billing starts and the provider is on the hook to deliver. 
> 
> The second lacking component is a ticket system, which is silly because
> turnkey cloud services are not expensive, and open source solutions abound
> for budget-limited operators.

It's not enough to have monitoring and a ticket system. You need to pay
attention to them, care for them and feed them. I can't count the number
of ticket systems full of ancient and irrelevant things or monitoring 
systems that people have forgotten about or don't know how to add new
stuff to. Even the cycle of,

  10 we need network monitoring
  20 stand up some monitoring system ...
  30 ... time passes, the person leaves etc ...
  40 ... the network monitoring system is forgotten ...
  50 GOTO 10

Cheers,
-w