IP accounting is the key for a range of operations like billing, pricing models application, live or historical traffic analysis, network thresholds handling, provisioning and SLA monitoring.Often SNMP counters do not help in these areas because of their coarse granularity; live traffic mirroring, NetFlow and sFlow break this barrier by offering data at a finer granularity. But current high-speed large-scale networks are able to produce, in very short times, high amounts of data that become quickly difficult to be processed. In this context, both spatial and temporal aggregation, flexible filtering and sampling capabilities become key requirements.However, actual large-scale networks are able to produce, in very short times, high amounts of data that become quickly difficult to be processed in a meaningful way. In this context, traffic aggregation and filtering capabilities are requirements that cannot be missed.
Either using memory or SQL tables as backend storage, pmacct can also easily feed data to tools like MRTG, RRDtool and Gnuplot among the others. A little scripting abilities are required to glue pmacct with external tools and a few sample scripts are already included.
