Monthly bandwidth graph for customers

[getstuk]

I need to create a bandwidth graph for customers to view their monthly performance, I would like to have the 95th percentile shown. This will allow us to properly bill our customers.

Thank you, loving Zabbix!

[Pada]

My Zabbix 2.1.8 (beta) version has the following options for its graphs:

• Percentile line (left)
• Percentile line (right)

... which is what you're looking for.

I'm not sure if it is already in 2.0, because I've never worked with 2.0 - just 1.8 & 2.1

I won't recommend using Zabbix for billing/financial purposes at all!
Zabbix is fine for drawing the usage graphs and alerting on thresholds, but not for accounting...

[getstuk]

What makes you say that? Would MRTG be better for accounting/billing?

I'm aware of the Percentile line and using that for 95th percentile, I suppose I should have worded my question better. I am curious how I can email a monthly report with 95th percentile data for each customer.

Where do I start to make a graph that shows monthly data for each host? Perhaps make a screen? Anyone have solutions they use?

I'm thinking of writing a custom MySQL query to generate these reports and email them via PHP but would prefer a method in Zabbix.

[Pada]

What wanted to say was that you should have a separate system for accounting and not use monitoring systems (eg. Zabbix/MRTG) for accounting!

You can always use Zabbix to get a rough estimate - like for double checking your accounting system.

The other problem that you'll have is that you need to set the amount of days to keep the history pretty high, otherwise the 95th percentile value would be computed off trends, which may be very inaccurate.
Like often you'll configure items in Zabbix to only keep data for 7 or 30 days, and not like 90 or 366 days.

[getstuk]

Is Zabbix that inaccurate over accounting software? Kinda scares me a bit. Thanks for the feedback.

[Pada]

It's not Zabbix that is inaccurate at all.

Zabbix is trying to conserve DB space by converting the tonnes of history data, which is accurate, into trends. These trend values (min, max & avg over 1 hour period) simply may not be accurate enough for billing/accounting purposes.

Typically accounting software use a transactional based model where it will perform a rollback and cancel the transaction if it was unable to store the transaction information. Zabbix isn't concerned about that level of data consistency, because it is not necessary to have it for a high performance monitoring system!

[getstuk]

I see what you are saying. Do you have recommendations for any free software to track this on Windows/Linux?

[getstuk]

Is there a way to force it to use accurate data and NOT trends? I found a guy who made a patch to v1.1 but we are on 2.0+.

[getstuk]

I edited the item properties to have it store banwidth data for 180 days in "History" and "Trends" was changed to 365. This should solve my accuracy needs. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[jbaptiste]

I edited the item properties to have it store banwidth data for 180 days in "History" and "Trends" was changed to 365. This should solve my accuracy needs. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm sorry to revive an old thread, but I have the same question, does just increasing History value will make zabbix not use the trends data ?

[Pada]

I'm sorry to revive an old thread, but I have the same question, does just increasing History value will make zabbix not use the trends data ?

Not as far as I know. If you increase the History value, Zabbix would just keep the accurate history for longer AND still calculate the hourly min, max + average.

You can set the Trends storage period to 0 if you don't want Zabbix to store trend values too.

Have a look at the Zabbix manual for more information on History & Trends: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...ory_and_trends