In our first blog, we went through the billing feature in NetFlow Analyzer, its advantages and how ISP’s or Enterprises can use the bill plans to bill their customers or departments with more accurate traffic statistics. In this blog, we will explain about how Enterprises can use the Billing in conjunction with IP Groups for department wise charge back.
In the present scenario, where cost cutting and reliable data is the primary factor, any enterprise would love to maximize the usage from the existing infrastructure and technology. With NetFlow Analyzer and billing, customers can leverage on the NetFlow technology available on their devices to generate bandwidth and traffic reports as well as use the same technology and software for billing reports. NetFlow based billing also gives more in depth information with highly granular data about the traffic, hosts involved with the traffic, applications used and so on.
Now, how would enterprises make use of NetFlow and NetFlow Analyzer for billing reports?
As an enterprise, you may allocate budgets to your IT departments or bill customers for the resources they use, but nobody knows which departments are really spending the money and for what. NetFlow Analyzer will not only help you to find how much is being spend for the Internet traffic but also show for what the bandwidth was utilized.
Once you start monitoring your network with NetFlow Analyzer, reports can be generated on an interface basis and you can see reports for traffic based on speed, volume, utilization and packets, hosts involved with traffic, what application was used and etc.
Using IP Groups:
IP Groups help monitor separately the traffic for each department or any other IP entity you have in mind. The IP Group feature allows grouping of IP’s based on address, network or range for monitoring and report generation purposes. In case you are looking to monitor the Internet traffic used by Project Z through a LAN interface, you can make use of IP Groups.
To create an IP Group, navigate to IP Group option under Admin Operations. Specify the IP Address, network or range associated with this department and associate the interface through which traffic reaches the department with the IP Group. You can also specify the IP Group speed for calculation of bandwidth utilization purposes.
Creating an IP Group
Traffic for an IP Group
The created IP Group shows the traffic based on volume, speed, utilization and packets and also the hosts and applications involved with the traffic for this particular department. The IP Group can now be associated with a bill plan. The bill plans in NetFlow Analyzer can be created based on volume or speed and along with this, you can specify the base cost and additional charges for additional usage.
Creating Bill plans for the department
The bill reports can be generated on a monthly or quarterly basis and using on demand billing, bill reports can be generated immediately. The Billing feature also makes your tasks easier by emailing the bill reports in PDF format to the emails you specify at the end of each billing cycle.
Bill Report
With this, Enterprises will have greater control over their department wise traffic and also have reliable traffic reports for departmental charge back.
Please visit here to download the 30 day trial for NetFlow Analyzer Professional Plus, which has features for Billing reports and CBQoS and NBAR reports. Do post your comments on our billing feature and what more features you would like to see in NetFlow Analyzer.
Regards,
Don Thomas Jacob
