Using public proxies generally involves browsing to a public proxy website to request access to another site, usually blocked or prohibited by organizational policy. When accessing sites in this fashion, firewalls, filtering devices and monitoring solutions are only aware that an employee, or student, has accessed the public proxy site, and not the actual end [...]
Today I received a phone call from one of our clients who had read my previous blog: “How to Benefit from Monitoring Good Web Activity”. This blog is focused on how you can benefit from monitoring internet activity that is not generally perceived as bad, or unproductive. The client, a network administrator at a large [...]
A great feature of Vantage Ultimate is its ability to publish reports and storages to the Web Module so that users can login, view their reports, and analyze data. But no one wants to have to remember yet another username and password combination to login to the Web Module, so make it easy on your users by using Windows Authentication. This way, as long as a user is logged into their Windows machine with their Windows domain username, they will sail straight into the Web Module without being prompted for a username or password.
Using Date Modifiers in file masks are a great way to increase the speed of your imports as they remove all the logs you don’t care about from the import list. If you're using WebSpy Vantage, you are probably interested in filtering your log file imports by date (only import files from the month of June for example). The obvious way to do this is to specify a date filter using the filters page in the Input Wizard. The problem is Vantage will still check every record in every log file being imported to see if it matches the date filter. If you have months or years worth of logs in the folder being imported, that's a lot of data that Vantage has to pointlessly sift through. The good news is, if your log files contain the date in their file name, then you can use file masks to instruct Vantage to never touch these unwanted files.
Here's a video I put together demonstrating how to get up and running with a complete monitoring and reporting solution in less than 15 minutes. The video demonstrates three products: WebSpy Sentinel, for complete data capture, WebSpy Live for real time alerts, and WebSpy Analyzer Standard for analysis and reporting.
A few customers have experienced some issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text format using Microsofts MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006. We've therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.
I was conducting a demonstration the other day on how to use a few tricks in WebSpy Vantage to filter out noise and clutter from web reports. If you have ever looked through the raw list of web sites visited by people in your organization, I'm sure you know what I mean. Watching a single video on YouTube will probably generate a list of about three to five sites such as lax-v41.lax.youtube.com, www.youtube.com, img.youtube.com, and so on. Your list of top sites also probably contains hits to ad servers and tracking servers, such as doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com and imrworldwide.com. All this clutter gets in the way of determining what sites were 'intentionally' visited.
Imagine you've just spent the last six months setting up storages, aliases, profiles, scheduled tasks and so on, and you need to migrate all this to another machine. Of course you could go to the Aliases screen and click 'Save Aliases', then go to the new machine and click 'Open Aliases', and repeat for every setting you want to move across. But there is an easier way.
Microsoft Virtual PC synchronizes the time between the guest and host operating systems. This is great until you have the need to set the clock forward or backwards in your VM, as it snaps back to the current time after about 5 seconds. I went hunting through the options in the Virtual PC UI but didn't find anything related to disabling this option. A bit of googling later and I've got it disabled by adding a few lines of XML to the .vmc file.
Today I've been poking at Microsoft Exchange 2007 tracking logs, asking them the very simple question of 'How many emails have I sent?'. Unforunately, Exchange 2007 tracking logs are not used to simple questions, and are likely to return a complicated and / or misleading answer. But the confusion it seems, all comes down to definitions. Once you understand these definintions, things start to make a bit more sense.