On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Eric Brouwer <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm looking for another solution, and this list has never steered me wrong. > I need to be able to monitor the Internet traffic for specific people for > specific times, and report their usage.
We use Squid proxy and Webalizer for this, both Free/Open Source. They get the job done. I can provide sample config files if you like. We run them on Linux, but Win32 builds exist. If you're used to *nix-style software (text config files), they're straight-forward. If you're a guy who prefers a GUI, prolly not for you. > Basically, I need to be able to say person X was on the web for 15 > hours last week. As others have said, it's difficult to report on "time spent on web". Most filters/loggers only know about HTTP requests. A single "page" load can yield 10s or even 100s of HTTP requests. SSL tends to appear as one (relatively) long-lived CONNECT request. Someone can sit on one page playing the same Flash game for hours and never generate any further network traffic. Gmail uses asynchronous JavaScript and will result in continuous log entries even if the browser is minimized and the screen locked. So this is an imperfect science. The hard part is explaining the disconnect to PHBs. They want to see a pie chart for an employee, with two segments, "Doing work", and "Goofing off on the web". Instead they get a list of servers with timestamps, maybe some bandwidth graphs. The only way to accurately report "time spent on web" would probabbly be to instrument the web browser using client-side software. Such things may exist (for MSIE, at least), but I haven't looked for any. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
