You need to read a bit deeper & broader. netFlow (Cisco) and sFlow (http://www.sflow.org) are protocols for collecting (reduced format) data about network traffic.
ntop can act as a sFlow/netFlow collector, forwarding data to another host. nProbe is a dedicated netFlow collector box. ntop can also process these flows (as well as generate them) - or it can collect richer information from the raw network packets. ntop's strength is the presentation of the data in a variety of ways. With the upcoming 2.2 release, you can access historical (time series) data from the rrd databases in an XML format. Once you have that you should be able to do anything you require. There are some messages in the back traffic that show this - look for rrdtool dump (remember, you can search the list at gmane, http://www.gmane.org). If you're interested in fee based services - implementation, custom data reduction, etc., contact me off-list. If you're interested in contributing documentation to the community, we'd love to have it - I've always volunteered to edit and post anything people contribute. -----Burton http://www.ntopsupport.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: +1 (972) 317-7273 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Lange Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 11:13 AM To: ntop Subject: [Ntop] Ntop for accounting? Ntop seems like a wonderful tool for monitoring network traffic but my understanding of it's design is that it is intended to be used as a "real time" tool, not really for long term accounting and billing purposes. After spending several hours reading through the web site I can find several mentions of billing/accounting solutions using things like "Netflow", or "sprobe" and the like. However, the site is mostly the typical wishy-washy marking/white-paper type stuff and there is almost no solid information on actual implementation. We have a single linux box that takes a mirror port from our main internet link. We need to monitor and report on traffic for accounting and billing purposes. What is the solution? Can someone give me a bit of detail on how the solution would look? Thanks for any help. -- John Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
