Accounting for Guest WLAN usage on 5508 Anchor

[Mr. Bash]

Greetings!

I am on a quest to be able to account [bandwidth] for usage of our Guest wireless service so that we can determine which WLC is using what % of the traffic on our proxy tunnel [internet service].   To state it another way, we have tunnels to our ISP which filters our traffic, we have noticed the usage of the proxy traffic has increased significantly over the past couple years and they've determined from netwflows that a good bit of this increase is coming from our Guest service.  

We have remote [foreign] WLC's that anchor to our internet DMZ at our DC...from there they go to a firewall and out to the internet.   So I'm trying to determine the best way to capture the details that will help me determine which WLC's are most active in terms of internet usage/client activity.  

I see that on the 5508 I can setup netflows etc but I'm not entirely sure if this will give me the detail that I need [breakdown by WLC based on usage].  Our Business units are tied to particular WLCs, so if I can account for usage by WLC, I also account for usage by our different business units. 

For additional details, we are hosting the portal on the Anchor controller in the DMZ, we are not doing CWA but rather L3 policy redirection to the DMZ anchor portal.  I appreciate any assistance someone can offer.

[Rich R]

Radius accounting?

Whatever method you use you're going to need a system to process the data you collect.

Collecting radius accounting or netflow records is pointless if you don't have something to handle the data.

If you simply want to monitor the bandwidth, and assuming each WLAN breaks out on a different interface or VLAN, then your simplest option is using SNMP to monitor the interface utilisation on the switch or router the WLAN is connected to.  The tools for doing that are numerous and many of them free.  You also won't need large amounts of storage and CPU that you would for collecting and processing accounting or netflow records.