[Box Backup] traffic statistics

[Dennis Speekenbrink]

>
> If you're doing billing, you'd probably want actual bytes sent and 
> received. I was thinking of modifying the socket wrappers to count the 
> bytes sent and received, then when they were closed send this 
> information to some other daemon which would process the accounting data.
>
> Do you have a pressing need for this information?
>
> Ben


One of our clients requested a remote backup service.  Box Backup would 
seem a very likely candidate for this (I still need to verify some of 
it's merits but so far so good!) and I'm contemplating offering the 
service to others.  Data throughput statistics would keep my bandwith 
costs in check (i.e. charging "heavy" customers), as well as diagnose 
any connectivity issues due to burst traffic by some account. 

The initial load is not *expected* to be high, but for future plans (or 
an unexpected surge) some primitive means of managing data traffic is 
necessary.
If as you say, some idea of accounting is in the works, (and you sound 
like it would not be a big hurdle), can I assume that it is planned for 
some time in the near future (within, say 6 months)?
As I will be needing such a feature in the future, deciding on which 
backup solution to go for depends on this.  The initial deployment will 
be soon I expect, but accounting need not be available at the start.

Of course I don't want to demand anything, and if the feature is not too 
diffucult to realise, I will try to implement it myself (no promises 
here though :) ).

As for the wishlist of this feature:
Basic:
- total data traffic per account (preferably including any command and 
control communications)
- ability to poll  (reset?)
- statics integrity between subsequent runs of the daemon (i.e. no 
(large) loss of statistical data on reboot or crash of the server)

Ultimate:
(to be able to generate informational graphs and such, I'm thinking of 
WebAlizer and the like here)
- number of files
- seperate upload / download statistics
- number of syncs
- seperate verify/command/transfer statistics?

Note: I'm not fully familiar with the protocol, so where I say: "command 
and  control" I mean any traffic that is not client data, such as checksums.

Cheers,
Dennis