If I am understanding you correctly, ntop, as it stands now, is not suitable for accounting/billing purposes.
An upcoming release (2.2) will provide historical data as well as real-time monitoring. I was using NeTraMet for traffic metering but it required custom code to keep track of traffic totals and I found that it wasn't nearly reliable enough for billing purposes (it has a bad habit of re-using it's flow index numbers. Without unique indexes it makes it very hard to determine if a flow is new or just a continuation of a previous flow). On the topic of documentation, once nTop has the functionality we need I will be happy to contribute a mini-how-to on using it for accounting and billing purposes. Is the 2.2 release branch approaching a state in CVS that it can be tested and used? John Lange On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 12:06, Burton M. Strauss III wrote: > 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 -- John Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
