@rle, I'll definitely look more into RADIUS.
I guess I forgot to mention the fact that I have HAproxy up and running, but it's currently only working for HTTP and HTTPS on ports 80 and 443, respectively. I'm also already running Snort with the paid rules set. I understand Suricata is somewhat better with Layer 7 app detection. Specifically, it can identify HTTP and SSH traffic on non-standard ports, which would likely be more beneficial in this use case now that you mention it.
Trust me, I'm the same way! I'm learning as I go here! :-)