Since Starlink has started with data caps and purchased data allotments for each month, our customer is asking how to monitor their usage for Starlink.
The issue is the data allotment is for two separate antennas, so in order to get the actual usage on the account you need to group the two together. In this case the customer has 4 separate Starlink antennas, so they would need 2 groups (Group 1 - WAN ports 3 & 4 and Group 2 - WAN ports 5 & 6).
Each “group” of two ports gets 5TB of usage resetting on the same day each month. Starlink Marine will work this way for all customers to my understanding. The allotment is shared between two antennas.
Bandwidth Allowance Monitor works per port. I cannot find a way to monitor a group of interfaces on the EPX or on inControl2.
From everything I can see this would work exactly like SIM Pool Data Usage, but for pooled Ethernet ports rather than SIM pools.
We received the following from the Dutch distributor as a workaround:
Set Bandwidth allowances for WAN 2, 3, 5 and 6 each with the 2.5Tb to renew on the x day of each month.
Set an outbound policy to load-balance the traffic across these WAN Connections - but set the “Load Distribution Weight” to 1 for each connection.
Each new session is pushed to a different connection, I find that this provides a slightly more even data distribution (still not 100%) across the WANS, rather than leaving the Distribution weight at 10.
If you tick the box “Reserve for management”, this should mean that if WAN 2 has used 2.5Tb but WAN 3 has only used 2Tb, the remaining 500Gb for that Starlink will be passed via WAN 3. Repeat this for WAN 5 and 6.
