Service Interim Accounting Overview

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 the Configuring Remote Access chapter in this guide 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 1 to determine the correct interim accounting interval to use for the service.

Table 2 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.