Host Accounting

The Statistics Data screen (see View Measurement Statistics) allows you to track bandwidth usage by traffic class. But if you do not have classes defined for each host (for example, when you are using dynamic partitions) and you need to track usage by host, you have another avenue available: host accounting. The host accounting feature offers a way to track byte counts of throughput for each IP address, group of users in a host list, or subnet. Here are several ways you could use this feature:

• Departmental billing (to determine how much bandwidth each department is using and then bill each department according to usage)
  
  
• Quota-based billing (to charge a certain rate for one usage level and then charge a different rate for higher usage)
  
  
• Service-level-based billing (to have different rates for different service levels — for example, gold service pays more than silver for same usage)
  
  
• Group billing (to roll up individual usage figures into grouped totals)
  
  
• Cutoffs (to restrict access after a user exceeds prescribed bandwidth)

Note: The host accounting feature requires a minimum of 256 MB.

Follow these basic steps to use the host accounting feature:

1. Define the host accounting categories.

2. Enable host accounting.

3. Retrieve host accounting data.

Note: If host accounting is enabled with categories assigned to classes in local mode, publishing that unit's configuration to a PolicyCenter group configuration will delete and then recreate the group's host accounting data files. As a result, other units in the group may lose some of their previous host accounting data.