For some reason MT has decided that the accounting function will not be to find longer in Router OS v7
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:IP/Accounting
Ye you can use NetFlow (TrafficFlow ) but its not the same.
I can not see anywhere at this forum or other places that MT has asked its user if they like to keep it or not.
I do see here at the forum that other also like to keep it.
So MT, please do not remove the Accounting function. If needed att it as its own package.
I fully agree.
This is such a very basic trivial feature that I cannot even understand why ROS 7.x would have to ditch it.
It is more used out there than you would think!
I currently have Netflow + Splunk running. Even the Netflow implementation in RouterOS 6.x is flawed where only v5 is usabled, v9 and IPFIX have some nasty issues making them not usable to process them.(opened a ticket > 1 year ago … never addressed).
Accounting does not support IPv6. Traffic Flow does.
I have migrated everything from Accounting to Traffic Flow (using IPFIX mode) without much issues.
There is only one major bug I encounter: the traffic byte counters, although they are 64-bit fields, in fact keep only 32-bit values that wrap around.
This means that the Active Flow Timeout has to be set to an unreasonably low value to force out the flow records before they can wrap.
That certainly has to be fixed.
I’m not sure where you got the “Requires dedicated java server” from. I am using a server written in Perl and I posted it on this forum.
Using the appropriate library it is trivially simple to write the data you are interested in to some file or database.
I would certainly prefer when MikroTik use the available programmer’s time to fix Traffic Flow instead of working on two features for the same purpose.
Would be interesting to se how many uses IPv6 today, in 5 and 10 years.
I have now the possibility to use IPv6, tried it, but did take it away, since It just gave me a much more complicated setup and no benefits extra.
At my work we do use IPv6 with Direct Access tunneling, but that is the only thing.
Accounting is an obsolete feature that was relevant maybe in 1995. Currently, it is still used only by few people.
And Openflow is completely unrelated to accounting, probably you meant Netflow (called TrafficFlow in ROS).
Maybe it would be a good idea to have some icon in winbox/webfig in v6 near to features which are going to be obsolete soon?
So people know it when they first configure it. Now, it is often unclear if some feature is safe to be used when you have been looking for something obscure.
@MRZ
You are correct. I ment NetFlow (TrafficFlow). Was mixing it some 
With accounting I do not have to setup any new port. With Netflow I need an extra port and a system extra to receive it.
If you guys would proper implement Netflow on current ROS then at least…
There is v5 , v9 and IPFIX and only v5 is usable! Due to ROS not sending out the proper time-stamp field etc.
I’ve exchanged mails back in Aug 2020 on this, don’t have the impression it was ever fixed…#[SUP-19834]
You can call ip-accounting obsolete but hell, at least that works solid!
With accounting you need to setup some system that will retrieve the accounting on a regular basis.
So there is no real difference.
I already have Syslog that sends data to Splunk using port UDP 514.
To setup netflow I need setup port typically UDP 9995 as well.
Then I need an extra solution/software to handle the netflow data.
Not simple to setup for small home network.
One more vote to implement this feature in RoS 7.xx , it’s very simple and very good. My reasons are these:
So if possible to keep ip-accounting for ipv4 will be great.
There has to be another solution for that. I do not care about /ip accounting and think it probably should be removed as to not clutter things up with useless old components.
Maybe you can use one netflow collector and have something run through that to generate RRD graphs on 100 different pages, one for each customer?
Also note that you can use /ip kid-control devices to track usage and rates per device - this may be an alternative to /ip accounting in some cases, and it works with both IPv4 and IPv6.
Some stupid response. Just because you do not like it, it should be removed??
I do not use BGP, OSP,RIP, Mesh, IPv6, ZeroTier +++++ so all that could then be removed then.
This is what I do like about MT, all the possibility to do things.
If you have tried to setup Netflow, you will see quickly that things become complicated.
Accounting is simple to setup.
If its removed due to save space, please add it as its own package.
It should be possible to make a Docker Container with a simple Netflow collector that receives the Netflow data, stores it locally (dropping a lot of information in the process), and returns it in the format that accounting uses now.
Then configure Netflow (Traffic Flow) to send the appropriate data to that container installed on the local router and have the remote system poll the accounting data from the container via some dst-nat.
I agree, a docker container would make the most sense for this functionality.
If all you need to track is the bandwidth used by individual clients and graph those, /ip kid-control devices should be sufficient
If you need more detail to see what destinations those clients went to and what they used, then netflow makes the most sense.
Yeah it would be a nice toy project for me to experiment with containers.
Unfortunately at the moment the container feature is not available for the v7.1rc6 version that I run as a betatest on my home router.
(and v7 is not yet ready for production use at work and in the hamnet)
I have not looked at Kid Control.
Can you there see traffic to/from all devices without adding one and one device to a list.
Can those data be sent out using Syslog?
Here is some graf taken from Accoutning. Easy to setup and easy to graph with Splunk and handles many devices.
.
Accouning?
Yes, to both. Kid Control tracks devices and packets sent/received by those devices and current rate for those devices, even if those devices haven’t been added manually. For instance I can see the bandwidth usage for the managed light switch in the kitchen that has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, even though I haven’t manually defined it as a “kid”. Kid-Control tracks the usage of the managed light switch regardless of how many IPv4 or IPv6 addresses it has, because it matches it based on the MAC address, and this happens dynamically. Since these values can be easily read by any kind of script, I’m sure they can easily be sent by syslog.
Don’t you dare Accouning my traffic.
