How do you people with dedicated servers monitor your customers bandwidth usage?

Are you using the NetFlow stuff from Cisco?

I've found one way of doing it but I'm hoping to find others just so I know all my options first.

Thank you,
Kevin Lynn

I use snmpwalk and rrdtool to make the graphs and i have a cisco 2950

In that case you can only track the bandwidth per interface if I'm not mistaken.

I'm needing to track bandwidth per ip address.

Thanks for the response!
Kevin Lynn

if your selling a dedicated server, why cant you monitor it via the interface? Since most likely your dedicated box is using a single ethernet interface. That would be the best way to monitor i'd think :D

Did you checkout bandmin ?

On our network we bill customers for bandwidth usage that leaves our network. It really wouldn't be fair to charge for the traffic to our backup machines (a service they already pay for); so per port was out of the question for billing purposes. I also didn't want to have a secondary network connection for each machine that needed backups.

I export Cisco NetFlows to a machine running flow-tools (flow-capture). Daily I run the reporting tools that come with flow-tools (flow-cat & flow-print) to print out all the flows and the output is piped to a program written inhouse to insert the data into a database. (Dropping all internal data from colo customers to our infrastructure)

We then just query the database for the customers bandwidth usage.

Also used cflowd from caida for some time, but prefered the storage format of flow-tools.

We also monitor switch ports with MRTG. At some stage will use RRDTool.