Software to monitor network activity?

[BandofBrothers]

Sorry for yet another thread haha, but the software recommendations given to me so far have been excellent!

I am looking for some (free?) software that can monitor the network activity, on a network that has about 12-15 pc's. It needs to be able to monitor bandwith usage of each computer, as well as logging/displaying which websites have been visited and how long spent on each website.

I realise that this software may not be free - so recommend whatever you think would do the job well, as I have no idea about this kind of software.

Many thanks for any help

 

[dugdiamond]

to be able to do this, one machine must act as a server with a proxy installed. then all other machines will use its proxy.

polling the proxy itself will give you all the throughput data needed

(i may be wrong)

OR (this one will work)

some (most) router's firmware will tell you all the info needed from all attached networks. they also have the ability to be reset.... so, you could calculate usage-over-time

 

[hmmblah]

As dugdiamond said a proxy server will give you what you are looking for. I'd recommend a linux server, I prefer CentOS, along with Squid and SARG. You will need to set this up as a transparent proxy and should be installed between your router/firewall and the network switch. Is the network running Active Directory? If so, you can use NTLM auth to authenticate to the proxy using their Windows credentials. If you want to content filter at all or control access to the Internet based on Domain User or Group, you could also install DansGuardian. Everything I listed above is free open source software.

If your router supports it, that would be the easy way to go and may give you the same functionality.

 

[dugdiamond]

(i may be wrong)

yay - it has been about 10years since i taught networking

glad to know my grey-matter has remembered it all

thanks blah

 

[hmmblah]

Cacti is also a good monitoring tool for a network. It's FOSS as well and runs on linux. I use that to monitor network bandwidth and verify hosts as up or down. If a server goes down it can alert you via email or text. It will give you good looking charts on various things such as CPU usage, bandwidth, memory usage, drive space etc. It does all this via SNMP.

Between the two solutions, I have monitoring and filtering of Internet users and graphs of network utilization for servers/workstations as well as throughput of my switches down to individual ports.

The only cost involved was the server cost and my time. It's not a turnkey solution but will give you everything that a paid solution brings with more flexibility at a much cheaper price.

 

[BandofBrothers]

Thanks for the info guys, will pass this on to my friend