The first step to controlling anything is to be able to measure it. Same applies to bandwidth, if one wants to control bandwidth usage, one should be able to measure bandwidth usage. NetFlow Analyzer is a network usage monitor that helps you measure bandwidth usage for your enterprise with which you can cross check your bandwidth usage as given by your service provider. The IP grouping, interface grouping helps in creation of virtual departments for ease of bandwidth monitoring and accounting.
With the ever-increasing demand for the ability to measure bandwidth usage and better billing plans, the service provider has to be flexible when it comes to billing plans and bill generation cycles. Generalization is extinct and customization has originated. To be flexible, you need a software, which lets you to be flexible.
Volume based billing is also available
A service provider has to bill customers according to the link / interface bandwidth utilization. And the billing plan has to be customized, according to each customer's requirement. In addition to this, the service provider cannot afford to spend much of his/ her time mailing the generated bills .
At a time like this, usage / volume based billing from NetFlow Analyzer comes handy. One can use ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer to create any number of bill plans by associating various links / interfaces as the need might be. Each bill plan can be scheduled to be periodically generated and mailed to the customers.
Viewing the older bills generated for a bill plan is also possible. Graphs showing the traffic pattern can be very useful to drill down to the time at which the traffic was irregular.
Usage/volume based billing is also very useful for large enterprises, which want to measure bandwidth usage of particular IP group based departments. Department wise billing can be done as per the bandwidth utilization. The large enterprises can form departments using IP groups and associate these IP groups to certain bill plans, varying with projects and clients. The bills can be generated periodically and used for accounting and chargeback.
NetFlow Analyzer is a NetFlow, sFlow, JFLow (and more) collector and analyzing engine integrated together. NetFlow analyzer does not require any hardware probes and can be downloaded, used in your network environment and can be evaluated for 30 days. Go through the following useful links for better understanding of how NetFlow Analyzer can help you in understanding your network traffic and bandwidth utilization.