WHAT: A Big Data Approach for Accounting of Modern Web Services

HTTP(S) has become the main means to access the Internet. The web is a tangle, with (i) multiple services and applications co-located on the same infrastructure and (ii) several websites, services and applications embedding objects from CDN, ads and tracking platforms. Traditional solutions for traffic classification and metering fall short in providing visibility in users' activities. Service providers and corporate network administrators are left with huge amounts of measurements, which cannot immediately reveal the real impact of each web service on the network. Such visibility is key to dimension the network, charge users and policy traffic. This paper introduces the Web Helper Accounting Tool (WHAT), a system to uncover the overall traffic produced by specific web services. WHAT combines big data and machine learning approaches to process large volumes of network flow measurements and learn how to group traffic due to pre-defined services of interest. Our evaluation demonstrates WHAT effectiveness in enabling accurate accounting of the traffic associated to each service. WHAT illustrates the power of machine learning when applied to large datasets of network measurements, and allows network administrators to regain the lost visibility on network usage.