Configuring RADIUS Accounting for Service Manager

The Service Manager application supports RADIUS accounting and interim accounting for subscriber service sessions that are activated by the RADIUS login and RADIUS CoA methods. When RADIUS accounting is enabled, RADIUS generates:

• An Acct-Start message when a service session is activated
• An Acct-Stop message when a service session is deactivated
• Interim-Acct messages

RADIUS accounting messages always include Service Manager time statistics. You must enable Service Manager volume statistics for a service session.

When you terminate a subscriber session, Service Manager first sends RADIUS Acct-Stop messages for any active services associated with the subscriber session, and then sends the Acct-Stop message for the subscriber session.

Note: Service Manager statistics collection is a three-part procedure. You must configure statistics information in the service definition macro file, enable statistics collection by either RADIUS or the CLI, and also enable statistics collection for the policy referenced in the service macro using the statistics enabled keyword in the command for policy assignment to a profile at the time of attachment of the policy to an interface. For detailed information about Service Manager statistics, see Configuring Service Manager Statistics .

To support RADIUS accounting for Service Manager, the RADIUS Acct-Session-ID attribute [44] has been extended to include a colon-separated identifier, which uniquely identifies a service for a subscriber. For example:

The Service-Session attribute (VSA 26-83) identifies the name of the service. This attribute is the value of the Activate-Service or Deactivate-Service attribute (including parameter values) that was used in the RADIUS Access-Accept message to activate or deactivate the service session. For example:

Table 149 lists the RADIUS accounting attributes used by the Service Manager application.

Configuring Service Interim Accounting

Interim accounting determines how often accounting information is updated and sent to an accounting server. In addition to the user-based interim accounting supported on the router, Service Manager supports service-related interim accounting—you can configure an interim accounting interval for services that are created during a user RADIUS-based login and services that are activated by a CoA operation.

The service interim accounting interval is specified by the RADIUS Service-Interim-Acct-Interval attribute (VSA 26-140) that is included in the RADIUS Access-Accept message or CoA-Request message that activates a service session. Because the Service-Interim-Acct-Interval attribute is a tagged attribute, you can configure different interim accounting intervals for a particular user’s various services.

You can use the aaa service accounting interval command to specify the default service interim accounting interval. Service Manager uses this interval value for service accounting when the Service-Interim-Acct-Interval attribute is not configured.

Note: You can also configure interim accounting for users. A user interim accounting interval is configured in the Acct-Interim-Interval RADIUS attribute (RADIUS attribute 85). You use the aaa user accounting interval command to specify the default user interim accounting interval, which is used when RADIUS attribute 85 is not configured. See Configuring Remote Access for information about configuring user interim accounting.

When the Service-Interim-Acct-Interval attribute is configured for a service, Service Manager uses the guidelines shown in Table 150 to determine the correct interim accounting interval to use for the service.

Table 151 describes a sample Acct-Start message for a service session. In the table, the three fields used by Service Manager are shown in bold characters. An Acct-Start message for a subscriber session without any active services does not include the Service-Session attribute.

Service Interim Accounting for IPv4 and IPv6 Services in a Dual Stack Overview

You can query the external parent group statistics similar to the statistics retrieved for classifier lists. You must specify the correct external parent group name and its corresponding hierarchical policy parameter for each of the input, output, and secondary-input statistics. You can specify a list of external parent groups along with hierarchical policy parameter for which statistics must be collected and sent to Service Manager for display in the Acct-Stop and Interim-Acct messages. The statistics for packets arriving at an interface attached at the input stage and the statistics for packets arriving at an interface attached at the secondary input stage are added and displayed in the Input Bytes field of the show service-management command. The statistics for packets leaving an interface at which the hierarchical policy is defined are displayed in the Output Bytes field of the show service-management command. The external parent group statistics are not limited to combined IPv4 and IPv6 services in a dual stack. You can also obtain external parent group statistics for IPv4 and IPv6 services configured independently in a dual stack.

You can retrieve either external parent group statistics or classifier statistics from policy manager. However, you cannot retrieve both the statistics for a single service definition. When a combined service is configured, you cannot retrieve classifier list-based based statistics. In such a scenario, you can only retrieve external parent group-based statistics from policy manager.

Service interim accounting and accounting based on service deactivation are supported for IPv6 services. For the combined IPv4 and IPv6 service, the statistics are a sum of the values in the external parent group and hierarchical policy parameter pair lists (defined as input-stat-epg, secondary-input-stat-epg, and output-stat-epg in the service definition macro).

If an interface fails, service-related interim accounting does not calculate the packets that are transmitted through this failed interface. For statistics reporting, only those packets that exist for interfaces when the subscriber service session is deactivated are counted.