Traffic Usage Policy

This section describes a NetworkShield Firewall 2006 traffic usage policy and provides instructions on how to configure traffic usage policy.

• Overview
  
• Traffic usage rules
  
• Counting Types
  
• Quotas
  
• Traffic Usage Policy: How to

Traffic Usage Policy overview

NetworkShield Firewall allows you to create rules to count traffic used by your network clients with high accuracy. Traffic is counted for each rule independently of other rules. NetworkShield Firewall allows you to monitor the traffic usage statistics from any computer on your network. To do it, just open the browser and enter the host name or IP address of your gateway and port 2200 into the address bar.

The statistics both for each client and for all rules in the system is available.
You can use the "display statistics for users" property to forbid showing the statistics of some rules to clients.

Traffic usage rules

Separate users, separate network objects and whole subnets can be used as clients and destinations of these rules. The program counts traffic for each rule independently of other rules. If there is a quota set for a rule, the operation specified in the properties of the quota will be performed when the specified limit is reached.
Traffic Usage rules can be disabled. A rule in this status does not count the traffic by the specified criteria.

Use the section Monitoring: Traffic Usage to monitor the statistics of traffic usage rules.
To view the detailed statistics of traffic usage, you should click Detailed Statistics in the section Monitoring: Traffic usage.

Counting Types

NetworkShield Firewall allows you to count traffic in two ways:

• Client & Server connections
  
• Client connections only

Client & Server connections

The Client & Server connections method allows you to count incoming and outgoing traffic for any connections via the specified protocol no matter if the object traffic is counted for acts as a client or a server in the connection.

Example. You need to count mail traffic from your server. And it does not matter whether your server sends mail message to external servers or receives message from external servers. To do it, create a traffic usage rule from your server to any servers in the public network via the SMTP protocol, the method of counting traffic is Client & Server connections.

Client connections only

The Client connections method allows you to count incoming and outgoing traffic only when the object initiates the connection, i.e. when it acts as a client. If the object traffic is counted for acts as a server in the connection, traffic is not counted.

Example.You need to count the traffic of messages sent from your mail server. And you do not need to count the traffic of incoming mail. To do it, create a traffic usage rule from your server to any servers in the public network via the SMTP protocol, the method of counting traffic is Client connections only.

Quotas

Quotas are used to specify limits of traffic usage and what should be done when these limits are reached. Quotas are set for Traffic usage rules. Limits can be specified both for a certain period of time (day, week, month) and for a custom period (for example, from May 1 till May 10). You can specify the following operations for each quota when its rule reaches the traffic usage limit:

• Warning only
• Block traffic