ISP billing - data collection, correlation, and billing

Mon Jul 17 16:17:23 UTC 2017

Flexible NetFlow is the best option for us. I haven’t seen a lot of products outside of open source that work with telemetry at the moment, and nothing that has billing functions. We’re far too lean to be able to rely on open source / devops at this point. That’s been a hard lesson to teach the company. 

It’s definitely on our internal roadmap, though.

From: Michael Krygeris [mailto:me at krygerism.com] 
Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2017 9:35 AM
To: Lee Howard <lee at asgard.org>; Luke Guillory <lguillory at reservetele.com>; Sean Pedersen <spedersen.lists at gmail.com>; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: ISP billing - data collection, correlation, and billing

On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 4:48 AM Lee Howard <lee at asgard.org <mailto:lee at asgard.org> > wrote:

Depending on the capability of the exporter, you don't need to export full flow information. With Cisco's Flexible Netflow you can define the aggregation in the flow cache you are monitoring. You are not required to use a 7-tuple.

An aggregation could be something basic like this:

Source interface

Destination interface 

Octets

Packets

This would give you SNMP equivalent for byte accounting on interfaces without requiring full flow accounting IF you're not forced to do sampling and IF you have flexible netflow.

Another much more recent method around SNMP (sorry SNMP, I'm over you) is streaming telemetry, which is part of Netconf/YANG/OpenConfig.

This is more of a push method for these yang data models(the relevent one here being snmp interfaces table).

It already exists on some Juniper and Cisco platforms.

Mike Krygeris

On 7/14/17, 2:47 PM, "NANOG on behalf of Luke Guillory"
<nanog-bounces at nanog.org <mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org>  on behalf of lguillory at reservetele.com <mailto:lguillory at reservetele.com> > wrote:

>On the HFC / CMTS side of things we have IPDR which I believe has some
>open source collectors out there. I'm not sure that IPDR is used much
>outside of the HFC world though.

IPDR was my first thought as an alternative to SNMP. Is its accuracy
comparable? It’s been included into TR-069, so it’s theoretically
available to telcos, too. And usage-based billing is part of it’s purpose.

Not sure I’d want to use NetFlow/IPFIX, since by nature it tracks flows,
not bits, and I don’t want to record flows. But I’d be interested in
hearing others’ experience.

Lee