Why IPDR Compliance is the Quiet Pressure Cooker for ISPs
When the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) calls, there’s no “hold on, we’ll get back to you.”
You’re expected to have clean, complete, and compliant IP Detail Records (IPDR) ready to go.
On paper, compliance is simple: capture every subscriber’s session, retain it for the mandated period, and produce it on demand. In reality? The smallest oversight can unravel months of supposed “compliance.”
Here are four critical IPDR compliance gaps we often see in ISP networks and how you can start fixing them.
1) Device Misconfiguration=Incomplete Records
One missing CLI command, one unchecked export field and suddenly your IPDR has blank columns where timestamps or session bytes should be. The collector still receives “something,” so you don’t notice… until the auditors do.
Why it happens:
Routers and BRAS devices have hundreds of export parameters, often hidden behind vendor-specific menus. One wrong template, and you’re blind to critical fields without even knowing it. One crucial example is missing out on NAT Events while exporting flows.
The fix (and why it’s not quick):
Pay attention to exact fields required, particularly when it comes to NAT translations and mapping to AAA usernames.
2) Not using the DoT format
DoT officials expect reports to follow the IPDR Compliance letter exactly with field names and ordering matching the mandate. For example, the letter requires Date and Time in separate columns. One ISP we worked with was flagged during an audit because their export combined both into a single field.
Why it happens:
Vendors ship their own logging templates and these rarely align with the DoT’s rigid schema. Even something as simple as “DateTime” vs “Date” + “Time” can trigger non-compliance. To make it harder, firmware updates often change field naming conventions silently, breaking previously “working” exports.
The fix (and why it’s not quick):
Trisul introduced a DoT Strict Format export mode that outputs reports exactly as the mandate specifies field by field, in the expected order. Beyond the basics, it even adds clearly labeled fields like Start Time and End Time, so audit officers see session details in the clearest possible way. The result: exports that are ready to hand over as-is, with zero rework during audits.
3) Storage Failures Creating Log Gaps
The compliance system stops for 6 hours due to a hardware or network issue, or a particular router or AAA Radius server has stopped sending logs. This has left a gap in your logs, while normal gaps related to service or maintenance can be acceptable prolonged gaps can result in penalties.
Why it happens:
Collectors and storage devices don’t automatically retry missing chunks unless you build that logic in. Many ISPs still rely on “best effort” exports with no gap detection.
Three fixes
Fixing this isn’t about one patch, it takes layers. With Trisul, that means,
- Setting up redundancy at the collection layer
- Installing monitoring like Trisul Stable Keys app which alerts when a particular router or AAA stops sending logs
- Installing the IPDR Watchdog Service
4) Missing AAA Logs
The IPDR shows a subscriber session from 203.0.113.25 but by the time you pull NAT logs to see which private IP it belonged to, the mapping’s gone. Without correlation, your IPDR is useless for subscriber identification. A log missing subscriber ID or NAT mapping is like CCTV footage without the suspect’s face. The footage exists, but it’s useless as evidence.
Why it happens:
NAT mapping and IPDR are generated by different systems, often with no sync on timestamp formats or rotation cycles. If one rolls over logs sooner than the other, your chain of evidence breaks.
The fix (and why it’s not quick):
You need a tight correlation pipeline between IPDR sessions, AAA logs and NAT syslogs, with timestamp normalization and retention aligned across systems. That’s a full engineering project, not a weekend config tweak.
From One Gap to Full-Time Firefighting
Even a single compliance gap can swallow days of fixing and re-checking. Add lawful intercept, NAT correlation, retention checks… and it’s less “network administration” and more “full-time compliance firefighting.”
And we’re in 2025. Automation should be the obvious answer but not the kind that just runs a cron job in the background and spits out a report.
Automation that notices when a firmware update changes field names, when a new VLAN bypasses IPDR rules, or when NAT mappings drift out of sync. Automation that evolves as your network evolves, without you having to babysit it.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
That’s exactly what Trisul was built for. Not just to collect logs, but to close every compliance gap as soon as it opens, across devices, vendors, and architectures. It doesn’t just “run”, it thinks along with your network, so you’re never scrambling for missing records again.
