Traffic billing software

skhron · June 15

For a new service I am developing for Skhron, I am looking for a field-proven software for accounting and billing traffic.

So far, it seems that LibreNMS might be exactly what I am looking for. However, from their docs it seems that it extensively uses PHP. Given my not so excellent experience with different PHP software, I have some concerns regarding that.

I would like to hear your opinion regarding LibreNMS usage mostly for traffic billing purpose. Or mention please if you know of any alternatives worth to mention/consider.

synthohosting · June 15

Hello,
we wrote a proprietary software in python using Netflow/IPFIX with routers

adly · June 17

Dismissing software based on the language it is written in is an interesting choice.

PHP may have somewhat of a reputation due to how easy it has typically been to get started and historical issues, but modern PHP is no worse than many other languages.

At the end of the day the quality of the software will be down to the developers of that particular piece of software, so it makes much more sense to judge on a per-project basis (which OpenNMS permits as virtue of being open source).

rockinmusicgv · June 17

It looks like it's open source so you could possibly examine the source code yourself. Just taking a few minutes glance, it looks like a lot of it is older code not updated in the past few years. That isn't really good or bad, but it won't take advantage of some of the newer PHP features like type hinting and may rely on deprecations like dynamic properties

skhron · June 17

@adly said: Dismissing software based on the language it is written in is an interesting choice.

Not really dismissing, but I have some bias towards PHP language itself. After all, it was developed for websites and not services that are intended to constantly run in foreground in order to perform their activities (including traffic accounting).

PHP may have somewhat of a reputation due to how easy it has typically been to get started and historical issues, but modern PHP is no worse than many other languages.

PHP as a language is not bad, this is not my point. My point is I am not sure regarding exact software for an exact usecase - traffic accounting for billing purposes.

@rockinmusicgv said: It looks like it's open source so you could possibly examine the source code yourself. Just taking a few minutes glance, it looks like a lot of it is older code not updated in the past few years. That isn't really good or bad, but it won't take advantage of some of the newer PHP features like type hinting and may rely on deprecations like dynamic properties

You are looking exclusively from developer point of view. My concern is more of a practical usability, therefore I think I will just deploy it in a testing environment and evaluate it myself now.

VirtFusion · June 17

Have a read through this https://docs.librenms.org/Extensions/Distributed-Poller

SGraf · June 17

@skhron said:
For a new service I am developing for Skhron, I am looking for a field-proven software for accounting and billing traffic.

So far, it seems that LibreNMS might be exactly what I am looking for. However, from their docs it seems that it extensively uses PHP. Given my not so excellent experience with different PHP software, I have some concerns regarding that.

I would like to hear your opinion regarding LibreNMS usage mostly for traffic billing purpose. Or mention please if you know of any alternatives worth to mention/consider.

LibreNMS is pretty good tbh.

gbshouse · June 17

https://www.pmacct.net/ it supports storing data directly in the database or publishing json data to the queue

skhron · June 18

@gbshouse said:
https://www.pmacct.net/ it supports storing data directly in the database or publishing json data to the queue

Can't connect to this website

Jab · June 18

@skhron said:

@gbshouse said:
https://www.pmacct.net/ it supports storing data directly in the database or publishing json data to the queue

Can't connect to this website

Works here... if you drop httpS
http://pmacct.net/

rcy026 · June 18

LibreNMS is pretty good, I have customers that use it to keep track on environments with 5k+ switches. In cases like that it naturally requires some hardware, I think one of them runs it distributed on 8 or 10 dedicated nodes.
Good enough API to automate things, collects every kind of information you could possibly want and stores everything in rrd and mysql.

Traffic billing software

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