website monitoring

[Reasteh]

not sure if this is in the right section but anyway.

I'm a bit of a server/network noob and was wondering how I would go about monitoring what websites people at my company are on.

Is this done straight from server 03 or is there some software that does it?


TIA

 

[Confused]

Depends on how your users access the internet.

My workplace uses ISA Server as a proxy server for all internet traffic, so is logged on the ISA server itself. This of course integrates with Active Directory and it lists traffic & sites by each user.

If your users access the internet directly (no proxy server) then at the very least you should have some kind of firewall between the inside and outside - what make/model this firewall is will depend on what kind of logging (if any) it does.
My old workplace did this, and logged by IP address, which made it slightly harder to trace back, but most users used a single computer, and the IP address stayed constant even with DHCP.

 

[ricky1981]

If you just want to log it then something like ISA is a good bet, if you actually want to start filtering traffic (ie blocking dodgy sites) then there a quite a few options. Popular ones are Websense (integrates with proxy software like ISA or can be run standalone), Bluecoat or Ironport (hardware appliances) or Scansafe or MessageLabs (Managed services). Most firewall vendors also have an option to add web filtering and that can often be the cheapest option and works reasonably well if you don't need all of the features offered by standalone options. All of these options will link to Active Directory so you can report by user rather than IP address.

Depends how many people you are looking after and how important it is to actively stop people or whether you just want logs so you can prove what someone was doing after the fact.