Bandwidth metering in large-scale networks

A system, comprising:

• a plurality of computing devices comprising one or more hardware processors and memory and configured to:
• determine, at a first metering component on a host of a provider network comprising a plurality of hosts, networking metadata comprising (a) endpoint address information and (b) a traffic metric, wherein the networking metadata is associated with one or more network transmissions for which at least one endpoint comprises a virtualized resource instantiated at the host;
• provide, by the first metering component to a second metering component on the host, at least a subset of the networking metadata determined at the first metering component;
• aggregate at least the subset of the networking metadata from at least the first metering component at the second metering component in accordance with an on-host aggregation policy;
• transmit, from the second metering component to a traffic classification node of the provider network, aggregated networking metadata based on the aggregation of at least the subset of the networking metadata;
• generate, at the traffic classification node, a set of categorized usage records based at least in part on aggregated networking metadata obtained from at least a subset of the plurality of hosts and based at least in part on a representation of a network topology associated with the provider network, wherein the representation of the network topology indicates different networking configurations of the provider network that correspond to different time periods, and wherein a particular usage record of the set of categorized usage records indicates a particular billable usage category to be associated with the one or more network transmissions;
• provide the set of categorized usage records from the traffic classification node to a billing node of the provider network;
• determine, using the set of categorized usage records, a billing amount to be charged for the one or more network transmissions at the billing node;
• and
• transmit the billing amount to a client device.