Daniel, don't know where you are getting such informations. Can you
please provide any docs supporting what you are saying? Even sFlow,
which intuitively should be the less reliable, can do the job by
playing a bit around the error:

http://www.inmon.com/pdf/sFlowBilling.pdf

NetFlow is then a de-facto industry standard deployed in a lot of
billing solutions today. It could be said that a solution based on
NetFlow needs a bit of thinking (ie. needs tuning, could generate
huge amounts of data, wastes CPU cycles of the network devices,
etc.) but that's it: it can't be said that it doesn't fit the job
because it's not accurate.

On the other side, i'm not too enthusiastic about polling massively
SNMP agents from a central location. It works. But the protocol is
heavy and at some stage your solution can remain constrained by not
getting the desired granularity of informations (ie. trivial example
you want to bill each IP address for the traffic generated/received
externally the data centre; simply because of markesting stuff; or
you develop business solutions and need to distinguish between the
upstream providers).

This is not intended to generate a flame. 

Satish, hope you are getting some value by reading these opinions
and pointers. As Peter correctly outlined, the more precise the
question, the best aimed answer you can get. For example, can you
point out which network devices (vendor/model) are deployed in the
data center? Any chance to get a simple diagram outlining the key
elements (ie. number of switches and routers, connection to the
upstream providers, etc.)? 

My 2 cents to the current discussion.

Cheers,
Paolo


On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 11:04:54PM +0200, Daniel wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> > I suggest you read the documentation first, then ask specific questions.
> > Pmacct and Postgresql/Mysql can do what you want without the need for 
> > further software..
> 
> flow based accounting is not the best choise billing issues.
> xFlow is not realy acurate but of course its possible.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mit freundlichen Gr??en
> Daniel
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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