Are you an ISP or MSP trying to monitor client’s bandwidth utilization and bill them based on the usage? The solution for your monitoring need would be ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer.
Why ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer?
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is the only tool which does NetFlow, sFlow , IP FIX, jFlow, AppFlow analysis for bandwidth monitoring and has billing module integrated with it to make ease of billing process.
Earlier ISP’s used SNMP based tools to calculate monthly data from customer’s edge router (called as CPE’s) and then manually calculate the bill based on 95th percentile or volume of data used. This manual process was very time consuming and tedious for the Network Administrator who is responsible for monitoring activities.
Birth of NetFlow based traffic analysis made this process easy and provided in-depth visibility to network traffic across that router.
NetFlow Billing:-
NetFlow data has highly granular information about the source and destination involved with the traffic, the application used, the traffic volume and so on.
NetFlow Analyzer with its Billing module gives real-time information on bandwidth consumption using NetFlow data which gives the enterprises and ISPs the ability to plan and manage their network infrastructure better.
Even if your customer or client asks for details about a bill you presented for charge back, the requested information is not just at your fingertips, but highly professional, neatly formatted, detailed PDF reports which are presentable to back-up your bills.
We have discussed much on ISP and Enterprise Billing in our earlier blogs
Scenario :-
As an ISP or MSP monitoring the typical network as given in below mentioned diagram, we as Manage Engine NetFlow Analyzer TAC team help you with this blog to make sure how you can effectively use NetFlow Analyzer to monitor the devices and bill them based on usage.
First Approach:-
You can enable NetFlow on the each customer CPE equipment and monitor only the WAN interface in NetFlow Analyzer and create bill plan for each customer and associate the corresponding WAN interface.
Second Approach :-
If you do not have control over CPE’s on Customer edge, Monitor the Intermediate router WAN interfaces and create IP group with customer’s IP network or range and associate the corresponding interface of Intermediate router to which they are connected. Then create Bill Plan for each customer and associate the corresponding IP group.
