Monitor Internet Usage with Intuitive Reporting for Management?

Question

Management wants to see what types of websites users are actively viewing and how long they spend on that website.

We're currently using a Barracuda Web Filter 310 to monitor Internet usage. It works fine but its reporting tool does not differentiate between actual requests made by users and secondary redirects that occur on a website.

For instance, www.nytimes.com contains items on its webpage that refer to Facebook. When someone visits www.nytimes.com, there will be a redirect to a domain owned by Facebook. Even though the user never explicitly visited Facebook, in the Barracuda logs, the user will be logged as spending time on both nytimes and facebook domains.

The Barracuda device simply tracks port 80 and reports back, so it's not technically possible to distinguish between actual human web requests and automatic redirects on a webpage.

But can anyone recommend something that will simplify Internet Usage reporting to non-tech personnel? Perhaps something that offers the option of only reporting top-level domains?

Answer 1

This is something that unfortunately can't be done easily. How does any particular downstream device know what is a "human web request" and what isn't? You could download the web histories of all the computers on a daily basis and go through those to find out what URLs people have actually gone to, but this is starting to get a little on the "oppressive" side. You're trying to solve a policy problem (Facebook is disallowed?) on a technical level, and people will always find ways around it.