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How to Monitor Employees’ Website Browsing Activities

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 07:12 Colasoft
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It’s reasonable for business organizations that they use something to monitor what the employees are doing during work hours because the employees are paid off to finish their work efficiently. In almost all common offices employees have access to the Internet, and they can browse any website anytime they want. Some companies have policies that employees shouldn’t visit non-work related websites in business hours.

You may think it’s hard but it’s easy and simple for a network administrator to monitor your employees’ on-line activities. You don’t need any keyloggers programs installed on each of all your host machines, and sometimes they are reported as virus. The most invisible method would be placing a network monitor tool to listen in all network traffic on your core switch, and you can see all users’ website visiting records, who is visiting which website, when, and even the content of the webpage.

The following steps guide you how to monitor your employees’ website browsing activities.

  1. Download Capsa Enterprise Demo
  2. Follow the guides in Capsa Placement to setup your capture point. Briefly, it’ll be great if your core switch supports port mirroring (SPAN). You just need to setup port mirroring on that switch and plug Capsa in the monitoring port. And you are good to go with the monitoring.
  3. Run Capsa, and if there is anyone visiting a webpage, you can read HTTP protocol in the Protocol tab (figure below).
    The HTTP protocol means there are website visiting browsing activities
    The HTTP protocol means there are website visiting browsing activities
  4. To figure out the IP addresses of the HTTP users, click Locate on the toolbar of the Protocol tab.
  5. Next in the IP Endpoint tab, you can see the IP addresses of the hosts browsing websites (figure below).
    The IP Endpoint tab shows all the website visitors' IP addresses
    The IP Endpoint tab shows all the website visitors' IP addresses
  6. What websites are they visiting? Now go to the Log tab, you’ll see all webpage URLs in the HTTP Log. These log records show the IP addresses of the visitors, the website URL they visited, the time, etc (figure below).
    All the website browsing history logs
    All the website browsing history logs

More resources about employees’ online activities monitoring:

Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 04:08