I’m sure with all the experience and intelligence represented here *someone* must be able to give me some suggestions.
I need to be able to monitor bandwidth usage on a per-user basis, but haven’t been able to find a single package that can do that. For instance, WebMarshal has excellent reporting, as long as all the traffic you are interested in is web based, but it is unable to tell me how much data has been transmitted using POP3 / SMTP. If I add MailMarsahl to the equation I have to configure it to maildrop users’ mail, but that would not be acceptable as several of them are mobile.
Isn’t there some way of simply tracking “total bytes between PC ‘x’ and the Internet”? The emphasis is on “simply” here, since the whole reason for wanting to monitor Internet usage is because this is a small business, and we pay per GB for DSL bandwidth in this part of the world – no way around it – it’s quite expensive and adds up fast when you have a data “cap” of 20 GB for the month and regularly go through that limit before the 15th! Last month’s total usage was 54 GB, in an office where there are only 11 users.
We are running a Linux based firewall / router and a Microsoft SBS domain, so regulating which machines have access to the outside world would not be an issue and I at first thought some form of proxy server would be the answer, but the whole email thing seems to torpedo that concept.
Any ideas anyone?
Chris