How to Plan for Flow Accounting

You use the IPQoS flowacct module to track traffic flows for billing or network management purposes. Use the following procedure to determine if your QoS policy should include flow accounting.

1. Does your company offer SLAs to customers?

   If the answer is yes, then you should use flow accounting. Review the SLAs to determine what types of network traffic your company wants to bill customers for. Then, review your QoS policy to determine which classes select traffic to be billed.

2. Are there applications that might need monitoring or testing to avoid network problems?

   If the answer is yes, consider using flow accounting to observe the behavior of these applications. Review your QoS policy to determine the classes that you have assigned to traffic that requires monitoring.

3. Mark Y in the flow-accounting column for each class that requires flow accounting in your QoS planning table.

See Also

• To add more classes to the QoS policy, refer to How to Define the Classes for Your QoS Policy.

• To add more filters to the QoS policy, refer to How to Define Filters in the QoS Policy.

• To define a flow-control scheme, refer to How to Plan Flow Control.

• To define forwarding behaviors for flows as the packets return to the network stream, refer to How to Plan Forwarding Behavior.

• To plan for additional flow accounting of certain types of traffic, refer to How to Plan for Flow Accounting.

• To create the IPQoS configuration file, refer to How to Create the IPQoS Configuration File and Define Traffic Classes.