How to monitor internet activities on company network?

Internet can be a benefit to business when used properly, but internet is often abused by employees and poses significant liability and security risks. In today's internet, P2P programs and IPTV applications can easily consume most of your bandwidth.

Therefore, monitoring of internet activity and monitoring of bandwidth usage is important to keep your business efficient.

This tutorial will guide you to how to monitor internet activities and usage of employees on company network.

How to monitor internet activities on network?

You can not monitor other computers internet usage in a network unless you have access to their network traffic.
There have two ways to see other computers internet traffic:
1. Configure a mirroring port(SPAN) in your switch.
2. Do monitoring in the gateway or proxy.

If you have a computer as the gateway or proxy server, you just need to install internet monitoring software in the server to do monitoring.
Since many networks are using a router as the gateway, using a port mirroring switch is a good choice. Port mirroring allows you to configure a switch port to receive packets of other switch ports. Setting up a mirror port does no change to your network topology, and it will not affect your network speed. A broadcasted hub can also help you to do monitoring, however, broadcasted hubs can only work in 10M bit mode, and it is not so stable. Therefore I recommend you not to use a broadcasted hub to do monitoring.
Read this example for details to setup port mirroring: Deploy internet monitoring using a port mirror switch .

How to monitor internet connections on network?

Once you've setup the span port, you can easily monitor internet connections using an internet monitoring program.
Here let's take "WFilter Enterprise" as an example:

Monitor all internet connections on network

Use WFilter's "Active Connections" feature, you can have a clear view of all connections in your network.

Monitor internet connections of a computer

Connections of a particular computer, you can kill established connections if you want.

How to monitor employees internet activity?

In "Online computers" of WFilter, click numbers under each title to view detailed records.

Bruce is an expert in internet monitoring and filtering on business networks.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com