[AusNOG] User-Aware Netflow

[Scott O'Brien]

G'Day Noggers,

Long time loiterer, first time poster here.  At the organisation I've been working at, we've had a requirement to attribute traffic (and the type of traffic) back to a user.  Not being able to find any open source stuff to do this, I decided to build one.

I've been building a tool that makes use of pmacct to put netflow and BGP attributes (namely community and AS Path) into a central message queue (RabbitMQ).  In basic, the tool is basically a set of consumers that listen on a user-auth message exchange and have access to auth history in my MongoDB cluster.   When a flow comes in, I'm able to add the user who had the destination IP address at the time to the netflow record before storing it on my database and increment the appropriate counters in Mongo.  I'm now working on a front-end (in Meteor) that shows information on the traffic and per user usage in near real-time.

There's a little bit of work now to abstract the tools I've built such that it's easy to use for the wider community.  I'm curious, is this style of IP based user-attribution something that people want/need?  How are others tackling this problem? (I know proxies are popular.)  If there's a demand for it, I'll abstract it, clean it up a bit and put it up on Github but only if it's an area people have found lacking.  Ideas and suggestions welcome :-)

Cheers,
- Scotty O'Brien