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IP Abacus is Leepfrog’s easy-to-install
accounting tool for TCP/IP traffic. It will help you better
allocate your bandwidth resources. And perhaps more importantly, it
will help you precisely bill for the amount of bandwidth
used.
IP Abacus silently watches locations on your network. It measures
bandwidth and keeps a log of inbound and outbound traffic. The data
within IP Abacus is stored in a MySQL database. That means you can mine
data to your heart’s content and use it for many
purposes.
IP Abacus Benefits
- Reports: The system provides three key sets of
reports to help you mine useful data:
-
Period Summary: This summarizes activity over a certain
amount of time, shown by IP or MAC address. For example, IP Abacus can
give usage information at the end of each billing period. You can
use that info to bill based on bandwidth. Or you may also bill
based on exceeding certain thresholds. IP Abacus can use logical
groupings of hosts to group IP addresses into sets to give
breakdowns.
- Host Summary: This summarizes activity from a certain
set of hosts, displayed by time. For example, this report can show
how traffic surged to a certain set of services after an
advertising campaign.
- “Now” Snapshot: This report displays your
network activity for the last 5 to 10 minutes, and you may call for
it on command. For example, let’s say IP Abacus notices that the
outbound capacity has dropped below 5%. You may call for a Now
Snapshot. You can use this snapshot data to identify users who hog
bandwidth.
- Easy to install: IP Abacus “sniffs”
packets to monitor the network. So there’s no need to
re-configure your current network.
- Flexible granularity: You can control how often IP Abacus saves data to the database. That means you can build larger data
sets within the database. For example, the Now Snapshot is a five
minute window, by default. But you can increase that window to
eight or ten minutes, if you wish.
- MAC support: Traffic is broken down by IP address and
MAC address. The MAC address is useful in a DHCP environment where
one IP address can be shared between multiple users with their own
MAC address over time.
- Multiple sample points: You can sample traffic at
multiple points, and then store it in the same database.
- Finer grained than Multi Router Traffic Grapher:
Information is stored in a better format for data mining, and
answering questions after the fact. In general, you need to set up
MRTG ahead of time in order to capture the good information.
- Does not use Simple Network Management Protocol: IP Abacus doesn’t rely on self reported numbers from SNMP hosts. Hosts
can’t report less traffic than they actually sent.
What IP Abacus is not...
IP Abacus is a powerful tool for accounting for TCP/IP traffic,
but it's easy to get the wrong impression about what jobs it can
perform. This section will let you know what IP Abacus is not. If you
are interested in performing the following tasks, give us a call
and we can show you what will get those tasks done right.
- Real-time network monitoring: There are other
programs that do a much better job of telling you what’s
going on with your network Right Now.
- Able to monitor virtual hosting: Monitoring is done
based on IP or MAC address. That means that traffic for a certain
IP address can’t be broken down by hostname.
- A stand-alone product: IP Abacus should be used within a
larger environment, such as a monitoring system or an accounting
system.
- Able to analyze information about the “other
end” of the connection: For example, it cannot answer the
question “what websites do our users send the most data
to.” Though it can monitor certain remote destinations if
they are configured ahead of time.
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