### On Tue, 5 Mar 2002 15:35:59 -0800, "H. Michael Smith, Jr." ### <michael@awtechnologies.com> casually decided to expound upon ### <nanog@merit.edu> the following thoughts about "Tools used ### accounting/billing": HMS> Can anyone suggest tools to use for gathering statistics for billing HMS> purposes? I would like to know what tools are most common among ISPs. Depends on how you're billing and how complex a network you have. At the provider I worked at, we billed based on rate and so we collected port level statistics, calculated rate fron in/out octets as needed, and generated billing from that. Our tools were at first homegrown (mainly perl based snmp collectors) but we had started looking at commercial vendor solutions too. One very large requirement was that of fault-tolerance. Having your pollers in one or two locations means you can lose valuable port utilisation statistics during even a small network outage due to counter rollovers at high linerates. It was important to be able to scale out a large number of collectors positioned close in to the target devices with the ability to fall back to a store-and-forward mode and remain there for extended periods of time in case WAN connectivity to the datastore fails and then recover and merge data once connectivity was restored. It was also important to have backup and failover capabilities built into the collector so that a poller/collector could take over for one that has failed. One of the vendors that impressed us was RiverSoft since their architecture lent itself well to establishing a scalable fault-tolerant deployment and was engineered along similar design principles as our homegrown tools. -- /*===================[ Jake Khuon <khuon@NEEBU.Net> ]======================+ | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers /| / [~ [~ |) | | --------------- | | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation / |/ [_ [_ |) |_| N E T W O R K S | +=========================================================================*/