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Small Business - Montioring Internet Usage

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by hwaynos

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Hello,

I am the IT Manager of a small business and we are in desperate need of some decent Internet monitoring. Right now we I log everything to syslog through our Fortinet firewall and then I can either analyze it through a analyzer software or I can view it raw. This definitely gives me every single event, website, etc... and while this might be good enough for me... it is not lamen enough for the execs. Giving me all the data from one site gives me all IPs for the ad banners, etc.

What they keep asking me for is something that would display the user and the sites they went too and how long. Not bandwidth or anything that detailed. Basically, they want something like your browsers history.

I have been looking for something like this for a while and I can't seem to find anything that fits perfectly. I would imagine that I am not the only person with these needs. Does anyone have anything they could recommend? I would love it to be linux and free... but, I have some room left in my budget to buy something if need be.

Thank you! I appreciate any assistance.

3 replies

by ekline

Well First off, you can not VIEW a persons internet history without prior consent for monitoring. Till I read this I already had in mind PRTG Grapher. It's a network Monitor and will tell what sites being visited, it will give you a bandwidth graph for 60 minutes, 24 Hours, and an annual usage. It also tells what sites(domains or IP addresses) they are connected to and which port they are connected by.

You require written consent from the user that you are obtaining this information from their user profile. This consent could be in form of a Hire-On Form for Internet Usage that expresses that the IT Personnel can monitor or review their internet usage at ANY given time.
It won't matter if Joe Schmoe watches porn at work, if he's fired based on the pornographic content without that written consent, he can take your company to court for invasion of privacy and might win.
...You know the Finance Admins will send it to the IT budget for not addressing the legalities first.

If you've got that then you're all set. If you wish to view something along the lines of screen shots.
RADMIN is a "non-intrusive program" that you can probably publish on your network and choose to "view" only on a user and take a screen shot of their usage when you know their Port 80 is firing up.(network monitors)

Remote Task Manager is also a program that you can uses Netstat to provide a live feed from a remote PC on it's open connections. In order to terminate them, you require the RTM client/server file to be installed on the machine.

Unfortunately, as you stated, you want just to simply see the website as they do. I don't think that exists at this point in Time. If you find something like that, then send me a heads up please. I would be interested to look into that as well.

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