Usage-Based Billing for DIA

Fri Mar 6 00:41:32 UTC 2009

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Rodriguez, Mauricio wrote:

> Looking at possibilities for an implementation of usage-based billing, 
> it seems that the same techniques and tools always come up.  I'm looking 
> for some feedback from the list on experiences with these tools and 
> techniques as well as alternatives that may not be listed here.
>
> +Techniques
>                --Flow data (Netflow, SFlow, etc) analysis to determine 
> 95th percentile traffic levels
>                --SNMP polling of interface counters to determine 95th 
> percentile traffic levels

I need to look into this in the near future as well.  The problems I'm 
aware of are:

1) we have customers on policed ports, and the interface snmp counters 
count packets before service-policy.  It doesn't seem right to bill for 
packets we dropped :)...so this isn't useful data for billing purposes.

2) our customer agg gear (cisco 3550s) don't do netflow.  Our bigger 
switches the agg gear uplinks to does (6509 sup720-3bxls), but can't 
handle export of full netflow, so we run sampled.  It's still useful for 
abuse tracking, but billing based on it would require some large 
assumptions and multipliers...unlikely to be of use.

The remaining option I'm aware of is to use monitor sessions to send a 
copy of our traffic to a system/device which would then either generate 
"full" netflow data or just distill the traffic into data xfered per 
IP/network.  What are people using for this on the several hundred mbit/s 
to a few gigabits/s or more range?

Are there other ways?

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  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
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  Atlantic Net                |
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