Re: [SLUG] IP Traffic Accounting software : Your opinion

[Glen Turner <glen.turner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew Wilson wrote:

> After having battled IPAC then its successor IPAC-NG i am left slightly battered and bruised.
> The above programs do not seem to give accurate details as to how much traffic has past through the monitored eth.
>
> Hopefully one of you out there is currently using a open source program that is returning accurate values.
> Im all ears if you are:)..

The typical solution for larger sites/ISPs is to generate NetFlow records,
either from the router (Cisco, Juniper, Procket, etc) or from ntop.

Use flow-tools, cflowd, NetFlowMet, etc to collect these.

There's a world of open source and commercial billing systems that
integrate with NetFlow, choose the one that best reflects your
needs. For a big but not exhaustive list see

  http://www.switch.ch/tf-tant/floma/software.html

This sort of approach scales to about 1Gbps. Which is OK, as incoming-byte
accounting at gigabit rates doesn't make too much sense anyway.

The nice thing about this approach is that you can hang ntop
off a switch's monitoring port or off a passive optical tap,
so none of the accounting system needs to be in publically
reachable space.

Cheers,
Glen