Internet monitoring program? So many, but not quite right...

We're looking for a basic internet monitoring program to use in our office. The office director is always so busy, though, that we just want something really simple - no keystroke recorder, no bandwidth monitor, etc. All we'd like is:
- A complete list of all websites visted (along with the time accessed), regardless of the web browser we use. (Some of us prefer FireFox or Chrome to IE in the office, but I've noticed that some programs only track usage in one or the other)
- It would have to be a program invisible to the computer user, and the reports sent by either email or through our network.
- Freeware would be great, but if you know of a good program that would do what we'd like it to, we'd have no issues paying for it.

Let me know, your help would be really greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

Surely best handled with a firewall on/behind the gateway rather than on individual desktops?

 

I think so, yes. All the computers in our office are on the same network, and from the research I've done so far, there are programs that only require installation on one computer on the network.
That was kind of another problem - most of the ones I've found that report internet histories are more geared towards Parental Control programs. Not necessarily a bad thing ... but when we're just trying to keep people from visiting job search sites at work, and personal email or social networking sites when they claim to be logging in time for a specific client... it's more of an inexpensive warning that I'm trying to find, to keep everyone honest!

 

Don't know how busy your office is but my DSL router handles most of that quite easily, forbidden websites are returned to the user with "Blocked" pages, and a log of all website requests can be emailed to me hourly/daily or weekly if I require it.

This is only a small router though, not geared for heavy office use... My choice (and I know this is a windows forum) would be to have an old box sitting behind your gateway running Linux and a firewall of your choice, tricky to set up but reliable and cheap (financially).

 

Great ideas! Our router's no where near that awesome, unfortunately

The boss was thinking something more along the lines of one of those $10-$100 programs you can buy/order online. Or even purchase in-store, with an installation CD or something. If no one else can recommend a good program, I'll see how the Linux idea goes over! Thanks

 

As you've said those are mainly for parental control, the best of which is free (a parent looking over the kids shoulder )

Look into it. It's a steep learning curve but all you need is an old redundant computer (no need for keyboard/monitor even), a couple of network cards and some time and patience.

 

Point your DNS to OPenDNS & create an account over there.

With OpenDNS you can block sites & a minimal log is also kept with domain names & IP addresses being accessed.

If you want more reporting capability, investigate standalone firewall/gateway programs like Smoothwall [www.smoothwall.org] or IPCop.

 

We use SpectorSoft's Spector 360 - it seems to be the leader in PC monitoring. At first I thought it was big brotherish but honestly, it has uncovered so much **** I'm not sure how we survived before it. Between the dashboard charts, reports and good keyword alerts (like "confidential ", "proxy" etc) it runs itself. We just check those once in awhile and we'll see pretty quick what problems we have now. You can turn off the keyboard recording and other things if you want. For us productivity is way up, bandwidth use is way down and we even have less calls to the help desk.