- What is it?
pmacct is a monitoring tool for network management tasks. Data collected
can be used for analysis and troubleshooting purposes to maintain the
health of the network. pmacct can collect, replicate and export network
information. It can cache in memory tables, store persistently to SQLite3
and output to flat-files like CSV, formatted, and JSON.
- Why is it needed?
To monitor data usage (IP-based or MAC-based data accounting) down to the
client level. Net-Traffic will monitor traffic for the entire RED, GREEN,
etc. networks, but it cannot pinpoint which client is using lots of data.
Connections will take a snapshot but not show day by day sums. pmacct can
help admins keep tabs on users that use too much data.
- What are the use cases?
An ISP may implement data caps and if the limit is over-run then you have
to pay for every additional xxGB of data used. Typical charges can be
around $10 per 50GB. With pmacct you can identify the high users and take
action, hopefully before the limit is breached.
- This is being introduced as a command line only tool. However, at a later
date, if it is useful to enough additional users a WUI page could be
developed as discussed in the development mailing list
https://lists.ipfire.org/pipermail/development/2021-January/009174.html
- Changes in V2 version
- Initscript is using IPFire template and installed with IPFire method.
- All other daemons except pmacct and pmacctd have been removed from the install.
- Example conf files have been removed from /etc/pmacct
Both example conf files are described in the pmacct wiki draft.
Tested-by: Jon Murphy <jon.murphy@ipfire.org> Signed-off-by: Jon Murphy <jon.murphy@ipfire.org> Signed-off-by: Erik Kapfer <ummeegge@ipfire.org> Signed-off-by: Adolf Belka <adolf.belka@ipfire.org> Signed-off-by: Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>