[c-nsp] NetFlow for Bandwidth Billing

[Raymond Ho]

I totally agree with Roland.

As mentioned in the earlier posts, the opensource tools are great but you'll need to spend time in regards to the following:-

1. You'll definitely need to do customisation to the codes for commericial usage.
2. Provisioning System Process or rather System Planning in general
3. Crunch the flow data in accordance to the format that you require for billing and provisioning into any DBMS.
4. Do take note of the scalability issue in the above mentioned.

If you do have a really good system folk, do take into consideration of using Flavio concept of coding your own netflow collector socket and do a real time crunching / parsing to pump into any DBMS. After that all you'll need would be modular scripts / codes to process it for the purpose(s) that you require.

You'll need a good box nonethless a perfect storage plan.

Just my piece of 2 cents.

Cheers.

--
Regards,
Raymond Ho

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PGP Key ID 478C4F42

Roland Dobbins wrote on Thu, May 03, 2007 at 03:39:12AM SGT :
| 
| On May 2, 2007, at 12:25 PM, TCIS List Acct wrote:
| 
| > In the past, we've only been able to do NetFlow on the ingress  
| > side.  It appears
| > that in newer IOS releases we can now monitor both ingress and  
| > egress.  This, in
| > theory, should go a long way towards eliminating the duplication  
| > issue if we
| > only monitor on our transit links in the core routers.
| 
| What most folks do for visualization/NOC use is monitor ingress on  
| all relevant interfaces on all relevant routers, and then have  
| various graphs/tables with various views which end up providing the  
| equivalent of deduplication.  It's certainly important for a billing  
| application or a security application to perform deduplication; I'd  
| be shocked to learn of one which doesn't, heh.
| 
| One of the benefits of NetFlow is instant traceback - so, I'd urge  
| you to consider something like the above at your edges, rather than  
| in your core.  NDE is really an edge technology, unless you're  
| recording flows for later forensics/troubleshooting/audit use.
| 
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at cisco.com> // 408.527.6376 voice
| 
| You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in  
| you.
| 
|                        -- Leon Trotsky
| 
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