[c-nsp] NetFlow for Bandwidth Billing

[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, May 02, 2007, TCIS List Acct wrote:

> > There is no netflow solution that's perfect for every network, so you'll 
> > want to do some legwork. Despite my experience, I can't personally 
> > recommend any particular toolset, since I've always rolled my own. (No, I 
> > don't currently have a flow analyzer that I can release.)
> 
> Our main concern is bytes in/out for billing purposes.  Nothing fancy, but we 
> will be sending NetFlow streams from 3-4 different core routers which the 
> NetFlow Analyzer must aggregate and consolidate into a single report per-IP or 
> per-subnet, depending on the customer.

Its probably not going to be a big deal for a single-POP colocation provider,
but consider your network topology when deploying Netflow. You don't want to
double/triple account flows and you have to assume some traffic will be asymmetric
and thus show up as two flows - each router seeing one direction of the traffic.




Adrian