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In this article we will tell you how to build an efficient Internet traffic registration system.

Let’s start with the configuration planning. The following configuration is common for medium and small organizations that use proxy servers for providing Internet access to their employees:

All the software required for the office’s proper functioning is installed on the computer to be used as the gateway:

• Proxy server
• Mail server
• Firewall
• Intranet web server

Optionally, this can be realized as a single piece of software. For instance, WinGate is made exactly this way. All of these servers can store their performance log files on the computer’s local hard drive.

Therefore, the best place for installing the Internet Access Monitor, Mail Access Monitor and Printer Activity Monitor software would be the gateway computer. Having selected the software versions that best match your needs, take care of the software’s initial configuration. More information on this matter can be found in the help files or in our other articles. In this article, we will briefly describe how to make your experience with the software most efficient.

In our understanding, the efficient experience must include:

• Centralized management of user and group lists
• Managing users access to their usage statistics
• Automatic management of traffic usage in the entire organization
• Providing department heads with means for controlling their employees online activity
• And so on.

Let’s start with user list management.

User as the program’s object (Internet Access Monitor) can appear in the program by one of the following two ways:

1. Adding to the program during log files import
2. Importing from Active Directory (Company-wide users database; resides on the domain controller PC)

If your proxy server is capable of synchronizing user records with Active Directory, then the best way for you is the number 2.

To import users, click the appropriate button, select the NT domain and click Refresh.

On the users and groups tree that appears, select the users to be imported to the Internet Access Monitor database. Once you click the OK button, the required groups will be created, and the users will be imported. For each user you can assign an alias, which will appear in the reports. Please note: if you assign the same alias to several users, information on those users’ Internet activity will be summed up.

We recommend that you organize users by groups; such organization will make user management more efficient.

We recommend placing all users from the same department to the same group and naming the group after the department name. You will find out later why this is so convenient.

By the way, if you do not import group and user lists from Active Directory, you can set up the procedure called «Add new users to group automatically». Here’s what the tool is for. When you are just starting to use the program and are carrying out the first data import from the log files, you cannot add all of your users to the program, since required information may be absent or incomplete in the log files. Thus, to add a new user to a group, you would need to run the program, select the required group and then add the user to the group. The program can take care of all that for you. You need to only configure the grouping rules. Upon completion of the next import, the program will scan all new users and, if a grouping rule triggers, the user will be added to the group. By the way, you can create a special group and configure its grouping rules in such way that not a single rule triggers, the user will be added to this group. You can name this group something similar to Undefined.

You are highly recommended to back up the user list to disk in order to be able to restore it in case the program must be reinstalled.

Now, let’s talk about report templates.

In order to provide a user with access to his statistics, you have to create a report template for that user.

Let’s suppose, we need to allow the user User1 receive his statistics once a day. To carry this out, we will create the template:

Once completed, in the Internet Access Monitor scheduler we will create the Generate report task and select the template we have just created. The task’s run options must be set up so the user receives the report via e-mail not more than once a day.

Such reports must be created for all users, and the templates must be selected when adding the Generate report task:

To receive the Internet usage statistics for the entire organization, you must create an additional template. We recommend selecting the report «By weekdays», selecting all the weekdays and save the template as «Overall traffic».

Once we have added a new Generate report task to the scheduler, selected the template and specified the time period for running the task, we will be able to receive our organization’s overall Internet usage statistics continually.

To provide the department heads with the statistics on the Internet usage generated by the department employees, we will have to create a few more additional templates corresponding with your organization’s departments. We recommend selecting the «By groups» report type and saving the templates under these groups’ names.

Once we have added a new Generate report task to the scheduler, selected the templates and specified the time period for running the task, we will be able to organize delivery of the Internet usage statistics to each of the company’s department heads.

Please pay attention to the following issue. Users often, mistakenly, create the Generate report task for each Internet user they want to deliver the statistics to. This approach is not efficient. The proper way would be creating one (or several) task(s) and selecting several templates, by which the reports are to be generated.

Summary

In this article we have learnt how to build an efficient Internet usage monitoring system and once more have described the report template’s operation scope.

Author: Red Line Software