The best way to manage your SIM cards in 2023

The best way to manage your SIM cards in 2023

Cisco Control Center is surely one of the best sim management system 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 (locally or global). The Cisco sim management system is suitable for various implementations and business structures. Customers can protect devices against breaches and unauthorized use. In this article we will further discuss a number of basic functionalities of the Cisco sim management system.

SIM cards overview

When having the Cisco sim management system in place for your IoT solutions, you will use the device overview the most. It offers a clear and concise overview of all your SIM cards. The overview consists of several columns with specific information. You can see how much data your SIM card has used in the past month, what the status of your SIM card is (activated, activation ready, deactivated) and whether it is 'in session'.

With the advanced search and filter option you can easily find all info and also group it. The overview can be arranged according to your own taste so that all information that is relevant to you is immediately visible. Next to the readily fields provided fields you get five freely fillable fields to process customer information. You can also export all your data from the overview to an Excel file and you can perform batch updates to enrich and change the data of a large number of SIM cards.

Of course you get all details per individual SIM card. Information that can be found, among other things: the ICCID number, the IP address provided and the MSISDN number. You have insight into the connection history of your SIM card to determine when and via which operator your SIM card has consumed DATA, SMS and/or VOICE. The status of your SIM card can be adjusted independently. It is therefore possible to activate and deactivate your SIM cards yourself. Incidentally, the SIM cards have an automatic activation.

Diagnosis and spotlight

It shows immediately whether your SIM card is connected to a network or not. If there is no connection you can diagnose what the problem could be. A test to check whether there is a correct radio connection can be done by sending a test SMS to the SIM card and the device. Upon 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 SIM card, as it were, so that it will try to reconnect to the network. If you do not want the connection to the network to be interrupted, you can initially perform a Send POD (Packet of Disconnect). This terminates the current session without interrupting the network connection. Even after that, the sim will try to return to the network.

Accounts

When becoming a Thingsdata client, you will receive your own account for the Cisco sim management system. The CUSTOMERADMIN user is then created for this account. The CUSTOMERADMIN has access to all available client-functionalities and allows the creation of new user profiles for your colleagues, such as CUSTOMERUSER and CUSTOMERREADONLY. You can divide the users into different customer accounts grouped under the main account, so that different branches or end customers only see the SIM cards that apply to them. Subdividing SIM cards can be extremely useful if you have multiple applications that are linked to different data bundles or if you want to allocate the costs per location or end customer.

Automation rules

With the automation rules of the Cisco sim management system you guarantee the reliability of the service and keep costs under control. Multiple types of automation rules can be created. A few examples: with the IMEI lock functionality you ensure that your SIM cards are only used in combination with the specific IMEI number of your device. If a SIM card detects a different IMEI number, it will automatically block and prevent misuse. You can also receive a notification if too much data is being used on one of your SIM cards, whereby you set the maximum usage yourself. With this 'cycle to data usage' rule you can send an email to yourself or to your support department, after which action can be taken.

An automation rule that Thingsdata can create for you is when your SIM card has not used DATA, SMS or VOICE for a certain period of time. Then this SIM card can be automatically moved from 'activated' to 'activation ready'. If the SIM card has the status 'activation ready' for a full calendar month, no subscription will be billed for that month.

API

The Cisco sim management system also offers you the option of using an application programming interface (API). With this API you can edit and open data from the sim management system with an external application. You can also perform multiple tasks using the API through the web interface of the Cisco sim management system. In this way, the functionality of the system can be integrated into your own applications without the user noticing anything.

This article is a reprise of an earlier post by Thingsdata. If you would like a no-obligation introduction to the Cisco sim management system, please contact us.

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