Question about ISP billing procedures

Thu Feb 28 12:31:13 UTC 2019

Background: I used to own the code that was used to bill for awhile...

> On Feb 27, 2019, at 11:10 PM, Michael Gehrmann <mgehrmann at atlassian.com> wrote:
> 
> From my provider days if you miss data you can't bill it or assume zero.

This was my experience as well.  I remember a router vendor bug that if the traffic was low enough (idle) where the counters would go backwards(!!) meaning there were issues with the samples stored.  I had to make a way to assume zero for missing samples as that wasn’t already in the codebase.  It wasn’t hard, but was not in the code at the time.

Make sure you store a zero value differently than a missed sample so you understand what that is/means.  I still have some PTSD from those days :-)

I recall people would come back and ask questions 3 months later, so keep all that stored data and poller logs so you can determine what happened.  Even writing about it, I have the log messages showing up in my brain that described routers that were behaving poorly.

- Jared