Traffic monitoring

On this tab, you can assign a fraud traffic profile to the customer. A fraud traffic profile consists of a set of tools that protect customers from fraudulent activities.

The profile includes:

• Spending plan – a spending plan defines the amount of money per day that a customer can spend on services. PortaBilling tracks the customer's daily charges and once the spending limit is reached, this customer's services are suspended. However, customers whose spending limit has been reached can still make calls to emergency numbers. Regular service usage is reinstated when the spending plan is renewed. The renewal time is midnight.
• Service usage monitoring – this is a toll fraud monitoring tool. You set the expected volume of voice traffic the customer can send to unusual destinations (e.g., Somalia or Albania, while the customer uses the service mostly in the USA and Canada) and receive alerts once a threshold is reached.

Depending on what fraud protection tools you apply to the customer, you can view their daily expenses and/or monitor their service usage statistics.

By default, PortaBilling applies the fraud protection configuration that's set up via the customer class. To redefine it for the customer, click Edit and select the fraud traffic profile from the list. For a fraud traffic profile with a spending plan configured, specify when this spending plan applies:

• Immediately – a new spending plan applies at once and the amount already spent is included within the new spending plan.
• When current plan expires – the new spending plan takes effect at midnight (00:00:00) after the previous one expires. The customer's expenses are reset to zero and calculated from scratch towards the new spending limit. This is the default mode.

To open the fraud traffic profile, click Show . Note that your changes to the profile apply to all the customers it is assigned to.

A spending plan defines an amount of money per day that a customer can spend on services. PortaBilling tracks the customer's daily charges increasing the spending plan counters by the cost of every call completed. Note that if a call is covered by a discount, the spending plan counters are increased by the full call cost, calculated as if there were no discount.

Customers who have reached their spending limit are suspended though they can still make calls to emergency numbers. Regular service usage is reinstated on the following day, when the spending plan is renewed. The renewal time is midnight (00:00:00) in the customer's billing time zone.

A spending plan only prevents new sessions (e.g., new phone calls) from being established once the spending limit is reached; it does not interrupt sessions in progress nor consider existing locked funds.

Here you can view the details of the customer's current spending plan, the amount already spent and the information for when a new plan applies if you changed it for the customer.

If the customer uses up their daily spending limit and wants to continue using the services, you can manually increase their spending limit or reset the spent amount to zero.

To temporarily increase the customer's spending limit (the amount of money the customer may spend on services per day), specify the new value in the Threshold field. The new threshold applies at once and is effective until 00:00:00 of the next day. At midnight, the initial limit automatically becomes effective again. Click Undo to restore the initial spending limit.

To reset the customer’s spent amount to zero, click Reset usage. The spent amount will be calculated from scratch until the spending threshold is reached.

Here you can view the service usage monitoring thresholds for the customer. A threshold defines call durations that are considered normal during a specific span of time for a specific code group.

If a customer sends less or more traffic to the specified code group and it is considered normal, you can add an individual threshold that overrides the one from the fraud traffic profile. Click + Item and specify the new threshold parameters:

• Code group – select which code group to monitor the traffic for.
• Accumulated period – this is the accumulated duration for which the threshold is measured. It must coincide with the period defined in the fraud traffic profile and is therefore read-only.
• Warning threshold – specify the new threshold value in minutes here. When it is exceeded, PortaBilling generates an alert.

To edit the threshold, click Edit .

To delete the threshold, select it from the list and click Delete.

View information about the last service usage monitoring alert: the date of alert generation, the code group name for which it is raised, and the total call duration. Click History  to go to the Alert history panel and view alerts generated for this customer.