In today's world of commercial Internet service, it is becoming
increasingly important to know how much data you are transmitting and receiving
on your network connections. If you are an Internet Service Provider and you
charge your customers by volume, this will be essential to your business. If you
are a customer of an Internet Service Provider that charges by data volume, you
will find it useful to collect your own data to ensure the accuracy of your
Internet charges.
There are other uses for network accounting that have nothing
to do with dollars and bills. If you manage a server that offers a number of
different types of network services, it might be useful to you to know exactly
how much data is being generated by each one. This sort of information could
assist you in making decisions, such as what hardware to buy or how many servers
to run.
The Linux kernel provides a facility that allows you to collect
all sorts of useful information about the network traffic it sees. This facility
is called IP accounting.
