A usage quota is simply a limit on the amount of traffic that a user is allowed to generate in a given amount of time. Usage quotas have a number of attributed that make them an effective means of managing P2P activity:
- A simple usage quota is easy to maintain and enforce and encourages users to be more responsible in their use of shared resources.
- Since quota based controls are interested in the overall amount of traffic that a host generates and not the specific type of traffic, they don't encourage users to tailor P2P application setting to bypass acl rules and so their traffic is easier to monitor.
- A quota system can be implemented using standard network hardware, without the addition of a "traffic shaping" appliance that can become a bottleneck and poin t of failure.
The following form shows how a quota is defined on Traffic Sentinel:
In this example, a Priority control is applied if any host in the Dorms averages more than 10Mb/s during the Last 15 Minutes. The control will be automatically removed once the host's traffic drops to less than 20% of Trigger (i.e. averages less than 2Mb/s for 15 minutes).
Traffic Sentinel automatically applies controls to hosts that exceed the quota.
