I am new to networking so pardon if this is a stupid question.
I want to see how my users use the internet bandwidth. I have around 50 Users in the network and I am using a checkpoint edge series firewall as a gateway for the internet. Checkpoint does not provide any report related to bandwidth utilization so I am looking for a another server to place between the firewall and the LAN switch to monitor the bandwidth(Sever monitors the interfaces while forwarding traffic back and forth).
Is that possible to do?. If possible please suggest me some tools. Or are there any other ways to monitor the internet usage of my users?.
Thanx.
Best Answer
I am sure you can get the utilization of the specific port of the firewall if you enable SNMP.
However your best bet here is to use something like Squid as a proxy server between the firewall and the users. You then need to setup all computers to connect to the internet via the proxy server (the most easy way to do this is with a GPO if you are running Windows). This will allow you to:
Control which websites your users are allowed to access.
Generate a report of what websites the users are visiting and how much traffic they are using. A good tool for this is SARG. Very easy to setup and use.
Block ads, this saves ALOT of bandwidth.
There is plenty of documentation around for setting up Squid and SARG is literally an apt-get/yum and then edit the simple configuration file.