Bandwidth Usage Billing

[Jacob S. Barrett]

On Friday 11 June 2004 08:08 am, Max Clark <maxc at beast.clarksys.com> wrote:
> MRTG is the defacto snmp bandwidth monitoring tool, however it does not
> track total GB transfered and the 95th percentile without external
> hacks, and even with this, your data will be truncated rather quickly.

You can configure MRTG or any other RRD based system to keep higher resolution 
data longer.  We keep the 5 second data for 3 months.  After that I think it 
goes into 20 minute averages that are kept for a year, then daily averages 
for 5 years.  The RRD files will be a lot larger, but a lot more accurate for 
billing purposes.

> How does one set up a bandwidth billing system (are there systems
> already out there for this) to track their customer's usage?

We just us a simple perl script to sum up the RRD data at the end of the 
billing cycle.  We also have some PHP pages for customers to monitor their 
usage over the month.

Another company I know uses cricket to dump the data into a SQL database as 
well as RRD.  They use the RRD for graphing and the SQL for billing.

-- 
Jacob S. Barrett
jbarrett at amduat.net
www.amduat.net

"I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it."