[c-nsp] FNF vs "old" netflow

[CiscoNSP List]

Cheers Mark...yes, agree 100%...the amount of time spent dealing with issues for consumption data is mind boggling at our Company....moving away from it(Netflow), and using 95th, fixed rate (snmp graphs as you have mentioned)  is where we want to be....unfortunately I have to deal with the migration of 1000's of customers, and also continue to support our legacy billing via Netflow until we are fully migrated.....lol, hence why I was hoping partially simplifying the netflow component would alleviate some of the stress(And also current fat finger issues)....If we lose some east/west traffic(i.e. traffic between customer sites on same box), we are not overly concerned....of course from a network analytical perspective, having this data is extremely beneficial...
 
Thanks
________________________________________
From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu>
Sent: Sunday, 22 May 2016 7:25 AM
To: CiscoNSP List; Roland Dobbins; cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] FNF vs "old" netflow

On 21/May/16 23:02, CiscoNSP List wrote:

> Thanks for the reply Roland - Our main issue is that we have a legacy billing platform, that utilises netflow data (So we can bill customers for consumption).....we are obviously moving away from this, as it simply does not scale, and is excruciatingly difficult to administer/maintain.
>
> Not having to apply netflow on "every" interface would help our provisioning guys....they occasionally forget this(Yes, this is an internal system/procedural issue...but its what we've got to work with currently), cust has no outbound usage, have to enable it, but we cant retrospectively "capture" the netflow data....so we lose billing data for the time netflow hadnt been enabled on a given Int.
>
> Was hoping we could scale back "where" we enable netflow, just to simplify things.
>
> Ultimately, we want to move completely away from netflow for billing, and bill on fixed rate pipe and 95%....but huge job, lots of legacy customers on old netflow plans, so we must continue to support this until we can completely move away from it....i.e it will take quite a bit of time :)

I've never found Netflow-based billing to scale well.

Just use simple SNMP-gathered data (guess that "S" actually stands for
something), and have the systems that can turn that data into an invoice.

Mark.