best way to track total throughput via hotspot and SNMP

RouterOS General
1

I am looking for the best way to find the total throughput for each customer. With all the netflix watchers out there our bandwidth consumption has risen dramatically. We are considering putting a 20gig throughput cap per month.

FYI. I use the hotspot to authenticate against the MAC address only, there are no pay-per-time users.. All users are on a monthly subscription.

I was using the wireless registration bytes in/out snmp, but that resets every the wireless connection reset, causing weirdness.
I was looking through the hotspot and noticed that in each user in hotspot/user has a bytes out and bytes in that total up for each session time. And since I have no session timeout, it tracks it perfectly, but there appears to be no OID for this stat.

I looked under hotspot active and found bytes in/out with an OID, but this is not the same number that is under hotspot users. This number resets each time the hotspot user resets.

Im asking for the best practice to get this number. Id like to stick with SNMP, because then I can stick the values into my SQL database and then display for the user, so they can tell how much they have downloaded.

thanks!

2

The canonical solution to this issue is NetFlow. Mikrotik’s implementation is called traffic flow: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:IP/Traffic_Flow

There are both free and for pay flow collectors out there, you can use Google to find one you like.

3

thanks for the reply, but I don’t think this will work
I am trying to track the throughput of the wireless user in the hotspot, which is not an ‘interface’, nor do the customers get the same IP

It look likes the netflow would be more useful to find out how much smtp traffic or web traffic, or traffic to a certain IP, but not as a general counter for tracking total throughput of all the users

I may be wrong, and I am open to criticism

4

Look at Patrick Schaub presentation on mum cz 09 and see how to run scripts inside the Dude.

You can try this and filter what you need:

/ip hotspot active print stats where user=“00:01:02:03:05:06”

Best regards,

5

NetFlow would be viable if you can identify customers by IP (static DHCP leases, which would not cause much overhead in setup when you already go in and add their MAC address for Hotspot authentication). Hotspots run on an interface so you can track flows on that interface. With static IPs you can aggregate bandwidth usage by source IP for traffic into the interface (upload) and by destination IP address for traffic out of the interface (download).