Collecting Bulk Statistics

The router offers an efficient data collection and transfer facility for accounting applications. The E-series router SNMP MIBs extend the accounting data collection mechanism defined in the Accounting-Control-MIB (RFC 2513) to include support for connectionless networks.

Service providers need reasonably accurate data about customers’ use of networks. This data is used for billing customers and must be available at a customer’s request. Accounting applications based on SNMP polling models consume significant network bandwidth because they poll large volumes of data frequently.

Unfortunately, SNMP is not well suited for gathering large volumes of data, especially over short time intervals. It is inadequate for use by accounting applications because:

• The SNMP PDU layout has a low payload-to-overhead ratio.
• Processing SNMP PDUs is expensive because objects and tables need to be sorted in lexicographic order.

The router avoids the need for continuous polling of SNMP statistics by using applications known as collectors to retrieve data. You can configure up to six collectors. The router sends collected statistics through FTP to assigned hosts, known as receivers. You must assign a primary receiver to each collector, and you can assign a secondary receiver for redundancy.

Note: The basic-encoding-rules (BER)–encoding choice is not supported.

You can collect interface bulk statistics based on sets of virtual router groups. If sets of virtual router groups generally correspond to ISPs, you can then forward the relevant data to a particular ISP.

To configure a collector to include data from a specific list of virtual routers, you must first configure a collector and then associate a router set with it. A collector can have up to 64 virtual routers associated with it.

To collect bulk statistics for a subset of all configured subinterfaces, you can define the subinterfaces using the following syntax:

Per virtual router collection is supported on the if-stats and igmp schemas. It is supported on all interface types supported by BulkStats. Collectors modified to use per virtual router collection or configured after a collector has started have a time delay (up to the configured time in seconds) until an active collector starts again.

The maximum number of interfaces for each type of interface and line module can differ. Bulk statistics can collect these statistics when you configure the slots with their respective interfaces to the corresponding maximum values. For information about maximum values see JUNOSe Release Notes, Appendix A, System Maximums.

Note: Define all interface types before you map a collector to the if-stats schema to ensure that you display statistics for all configured interfaces in the first interval.

The name of the bulk statistics file that is transferred to the host when there is a collectorSequence attribute in the remote name is as follows:

where:

• fileName—Name of the file, which includes sysName, sysUpTime, depending on the attributes specified
• -z—Receiver index value
• mmddHHMM—Timestamp when the receiver is created in month/day/hour/minute format
• -s—Actual sequence number

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