PACT 1.0

PACT or Port Accounting & Collection Tool is an SNMP-Tool to do port-accounting for any device that conforms to SNMP standards and has at least a certain amount of SNMP-querieable data (e.g. octets in/out, etc.). Additional tool will allow it to use Apache logfiles as basis for accounting. As of version 0.9f, it also includes support for Linux ipchains.
The idea is based on an old script I wrote that used snmpwalk together with some shell script magic to do accounting on several routers. Among others, two main drawbacks were included in the original version - if the internal offset of a port changed, the script would start recording the wrong port. Also, the speed factor was a problem (it took between 3 and 7 minutes to go through 15 routers and calculate & store the port counters in the database). With PACT, all drawbacks have been addressed. Now, all ports are addressed with their symbolic name, and also speed issues have greatly improved (down to approximately 1 second per router, switch, hub etc.). Plus a nice UI has been added, allowing anybody to alter or create entries or config options.
PACT consists of several different parts, depending on the kind of work being done, and uses a combination of programs, tools and libraries. The core program, the data collector, is based on an example program from the ucd-snmp-package. Its written entirely in C and utilizes the libsnmp from the ucd-snmp-package. The data is collected using configuration data retrieved from a MySQL database, which is also used to store the collected daa.
All UI-specific work is done using HTML pages, most of which using PHP with its MySQL routines to display and administer dynamic data (like host, customer and port data, etc.). Finally, tools to consolidate the collected data and reduce the amounts by adding up on a day-to-day base were planned in C for performance reasons (our current accounting collects nearly two million of data sets per month, which is compressed to about 200000 sets of data), but was written as PHP/SQL-scripts, as just about all work is done in the core of MySQL, so the frontend-performance doesnt matter too much.
Apart from SNMP-ports, PACT can also be used to do accounting for just about anything that can be counted. To date, an additional program exists (for registered users) converting Apache http-logs into PACT data. This was necessary, as doing an accounting for virtual servers running on a single IP is not possible via SNMP ...
Version restrictions:
- Limited to 3 seperate SNMP hosts, but otherwise functionally unlimited.