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When intranet users begin indiscriminately surfing the World Wide Web, you'll want a tool for monitoring their Internet usage. We found Kansmen's LittleBrother the most helpful among three such products.
The explosion of Internet access from intranets presents organizations with the same issues they had when telephones appeared on every desk. Much as managers once had to set policies to regulate employees' long-distance and personal calls, today's IT administrators often need to monitor and control unproductive Web surfing.
We looked at three tools designed to monitor internal network traffic for patterns of use and abuse. While they provided similar functionality, Kansmen Corp. 's LittleBrother proved the best, especially in terms of ready and useful analysis. Elron Software, Inc. 's Internet Manager provided good flexibility, while SurfControl's SurfControl Scout was a trifle weak in clarity of presentation.
Monitoring
The three packages provide similar monitoring capabilities, which are at their heart. Kansmen's LittleBrother doesn't present as much ready detail as the others - the company opted instead for a more graphical display but you can drill down to useful information with a few mouse clicks.
We especially liked LittleBrother's dynamically updated bar chart. The bar chart shows traffic analysis in terms of users or sites visited, time or volume of traffic, and protocol used or the site rating (productive, neutral or unproductive) .
The only negatives emerged when we found that the dynamic analysis only covered the preceding hour and that this was the only aspect of the default display we couldn't configure. Elron's Internet Manager captures a lot of useful, detailed information, but its sorting and presentation of Web sites and page components is a bit clumsy.
Also on the downside, you must manually refresh the display, meaning you don't get a picture of current activity unless you specifically ask for it. A separate monitor application provided a real-time view of the most recent accesses, though in too cryptic a fashion for our tastes.
SurfControl Scout provides what at first seems to be the most detailed monitoring and recording, with features that let you quickly drill down to look at access patterns, even for individual elements of Web pages being visited. Unfortunately, SurfControl Scout monitors and records so many details, including outside workstations visiting the...