As an administrator, you can always monitor internet access by the IP address of the user. This is possible either by using a network traffic capturing tool like ethereal or by a more sophisticated HTTP traffic filtering device. The IP address is easily obtained by capturing an HTTP request, which includes an IP address but does not include a user name. Even if you have static IP addresses for all computers in your network, you’ll only be able to identify the machine by using a manual mapping but not the user using the machine.

Therefore, to effectively monitor internet access, you must have a reliable method of resolving user names. For user name knowledge, it is imperative that reliable user name resolution is carried out. The iPolicy ‘User Name Resolution’ feature is built into SAS (Secure Authentication Server) which interacts with Windows domain controllers in your nrtwork to obtain resolved user names.

The ‘User Name Resolution’ feature helps you to monitor and control the Web usage activities of various users by user name, and also gain insight into their Web usage patterns. You can aim to achieve multiple benefits with this feature:

• Increase employees' productivity by controlling their Web browsing habits
• Reduce cyber slacking – the time wasted by employees online
• Track and analyze employees’ activities by tracking their Web usage pattern
• Protect the network from dangerous downloads in real-time
• Prevent confidential data leakage through socially-engineered Web sites

Reports for Monitoring Web Usage

The ‘Top Web Users’ report identifies the users within a network who accessed internet the most as well as the hosts from where most accesses were made by the user. You can determine the top Web users, the level of activity by hits, and the amount of data transferred

The ‘Top Web Sites by Username’ report provides information on top Web sites accessed by the users along with the amount of bytes transferred and number of hits made to the Web site.