Enabling traffic accounting

MetalSoft has the ability to perform accounting on traffic. It does so by parsing an sFLOW stream. To enable this feature an edge device (switch, router) should send traffic to UDP port 6343 on the agent’s IP address configured on the datacenter BSIVRRPListenIPv4 property.

MetalSoft will then record the traffic, and based on the source/destination IP address will determine the infrastructure that generated the respective traffic and will add the traffic on the on-demand utilization records for the respective infrastructure.

Redundancy, scalability and accuracy

MetalSoft needs to have a stream of sFLOW that is 100% accurate to each agent. Duplicated or incomplete sFLOW traffic will result in erroneous accounting as MetalSoft does not do duplication detection due to resource constraints. To enable redundancy a tool called sflowtool can be used to replicate the sflow stream to multiple agents at the same time. If one of the datacenters will go down, the MetalSoft software will simply interrogate the remaining one for traffic data. All agents must receive 100% of the traffic for accounting to be accurate on all agents.