Re: Question about ISP billing procedures

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck nether net>]

Background: I used to own the code that was used to bill for awhile...

> On Feb 27, 2019, at 11:10 PM, Michael Gehrmann <mgehrmann () atlassian com> wrote:
>
> From my provider days if you miss data you can't bill it or assume zero.


This was my experience as well.  I remember a router vendor bug that if the traffic was low enough (idle) where the 
counters would go backwards(!!) meaning there were issues with the samples stored.  I had to make a way to assume zero 
for missing samples as that wasn’t already in the codebase.  It wasn’t hard, but was not in the code at the time.

Make sure you store a zero value differently than a missed sample so you understand what that is/means.  I still have 
some PTSD from those days :-)

I recall people would come back and ask questions 3 months later, so keep all that stored data and poller logs so you 
can determine what happened.  Even writing about it, I have the log messages showing up in my brain that described 
routers that were behaving poorly.

- Jared