I recently qualified as a US Soccer Referee. Which sounds very official, but in practice means that completed some online training and participated in 3 hours of in-person training.
So I’ve done the training, but my practical experience is minimal. However the local soccer league is very keen to put me to work regardless, because it turns out there’s a shortage of people who want to spend their weekends chasing a ball around a field while getting criticized for every decision you make.
As a referee, I now have access to a new web application that shows all the games that are being played each weekend, and I can see why they’re so desperate. It varies, but in our local youth league there are usually around 150 games each weekend, each of which requires between one and three referees.
This is an overwhelming number to choose from, but thankfully the website has some powerful filtering capabilities – so if I want to search only for games that will be played on Saturday morning on the field next to my house between two teams of 8 year-olds who are playing just for fun, then I can do that. And yes, that’s exactly the game I’ll be refereeing this coming weekend… because I’m less scared of making a mistake in front of a group of 8 year old boys who are still confused about the rules.
Subscriber Reports on the Metaswitch
Those of you using a Metaswitch system will know that there are a variety of interfaces available for looking at subscriber data – primarily MetaView Explorer and MetaView Web. These are both really useful if you want to look at a specific subscriber, and you already know the Directory Number, but if you’re wanting to run a subscriber report or a subscriber query to find a group of subscribers that share a particular characteristic, then there’s a better way.
For subscriber reports, your best bet is to connect to something called the Shadow Configuration Database. This is a full database of all the static configuration about your subscribers that is stored on the CFS.
So if you wanted to run a query showing all subscribers in a certain rate center who have a particular feature enabled, or are subscribed to a particular LD carrier, or if you wanted a list of all the phone models currently in use on your system – then the Shadow Config Database is the way to go.
Sample Subscriber Queries
For example, you could ask:
How many subscribers have voicemail?
SELECT count(*) FROM Meta_Subscriber WHERE Voicemail_Subscribed = true;Or, could I get a list of all phone models in use?
SELECT baseinformation_devicemodel, baseInformation_formattedmacaddress, baseinformation_userdirectorynumber, businessgroupname FROM Meta_ManagedDevice ORDER by baseinformation_devicemodel ASC;There are multiple tables with hundreds of fields, so pretty much anything that the CFS stores in static configuration (i.e. not call info, or dynamic data like the current call-forwarding number) can be queried through the Shadow Config Database.
Learn more…
I won’t try to explain how to access the database here – if you have a Metaswitch Communities account you can learn all about it here. Typically you would use a tool called pgAdmin to connect and make the queries, then analyze the results in Excel.
If you’re an existing client and would like to run one or more subscriber reports, feel free to reach out to your primary technical contact and we’d be happy to look into that for you. If you’d like to become a client, then read more about our support retainers to see if we’d be a good fit to work together.
