10 Reasons to Use WebSpy Vantage to Report on Forefront TMG
WebSpy's software transforms the raw data in log files into manageable information, providing a transparent view over organizational Internet, email and network usage. The software can import and analyze more than 200 log formats from many different vendors. WebSpy’s solutions are unobtrusive, scalable and available in different ranges to suit any organizational size or budget.
1. Vendor Neutral
In addition to Forefront TMG logs, WebSpy Vantage can report on more than 200 log formats from different vendors. This means WebSpy users only need one application to achieve all reporting requirements, spending less on software maintenance, hardware and administration..
2. Logically Group Users & Sites
Using TMG there is no way to group users into departments or locations, or IP addresses into subnets, or extensions such as .html, .pdf or .exe into file types. WebSpy Vantage's ability to group and represent raw log data in more meaningful ways, using aliases such as departments or usernames, enables easier analysis of data and increases the value of a report.
WebSpy Vantage easily Import user and department information from any LDAP compatible directory server using the ‘Import from LDAP’ wizard (including Microsoft® Active Directory and Novell® eDirectory).
3. Filter out Irrelevant Traffic
When you generate a report in TMG, you can only filter the report by a date range. There is no way to filter out anonymous (unauthenticated) traffic or exclude traffic coming from advertising servers (such as doubleclick and 2mdn.net) that tend to dominate most of the top 10 sites.
WebSpy’s solutions can filter out data, such as Pop-ups and website sub-domains, that can affect the accuracy of browsing behavior, giving you a far more accurate picture of how the web is being used.
See video on how to remove clutter from your web reports.
4. Flexible & Customizable Reporting
Customization of each overview in the TMG report is limited to the number of items to show (e.g. top 5 or top 50 users), and the sort order (Incoming Bytes, Outgoing Bytes, Requests and Total Bytes).
There is no way to add custom columns such as total browsing time, average session time, or number of users/sites/IPs to the report tables. WebSpy’s Vantage deliver a wide variety of predefined templates as well as fully customized reports in a variety of formats.
5. Customizable Website Categorization
One of the major features introduced in TMG since ISA Server 2006 is the included URL categorization technology. Although the TMG report gives you an overview of the categories that have been visited, the report does not use this information to display a productivity assessment for your users.
WebSpy Vantage can analyze TMG categories, as well as classify web sites based on a comprehensive set of customizable keywords. You can categorize your own sites easily by adding your own unique keywords based on content category (News, Entertainment, Adult) or appropriateness (Work Related, Non-work related, Productive, Unproductive). The customization of these keywords is vital as the categories that are deemed productive and unproductive will vary wildly depending on the industry and organization.
6. Policy Based Reporting
WebSpy’s solutions can selectively monitor and report based on your organization’s guidelines, ensuring privacy for compliant users. Through the use of exception based reporting, or queries such as “users with sessions longer than 30 minutes”, the solutions provide information on only those users who have breached the usage policy.
7. Securely Distribute Information & Responsibility
When you generate a report in TMG, you get the option to email it to a specific email address. What if you would like to create a report for every department, and then email it to the managers of each department? Or better yet, host the report on a secure web server where department managers can log in and view their reports?
WebSpy Vantage Ultimate comes with a secure ‘Web Module’ specifically for this purpose. Using Vantage Ultimate, you can securely distribute reports and storages to department managers, who then have the responsibility of enforcing acceptable usage within their team. Even better, schedule secure reports to allow employees to view their own Internet usage. More often than not, employees tend to underestimate the time they spend browsing non-work related sites. Allowing employees to view, for example, their productive and unproductive activity can help foster and drive responsible Internet usage behaviour.
8. Automated Reporting
Reports can conveniently be automatically produced on daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis using WebSpy’s automated task scheduling.
9. Speed
WebSpy Vantage use multithreading techniques to utilizes the extra processing power on machines with multiple cores or CPUs to import log files and generate reports faster, up to 50,000 records per second.
10. Powerful Drilldown Capabilities
WebSpy Vantage lets you either interactively drilldown into a user or site, or produce a regular report that includes further details about what your top users have actually been up to. For example, see the sites that the top 5 users accessed, see the users that downloaded the most traffic from youtube? These are fairly standard reporting requirements that simply cannot be achieved using the inbuilt TMG reporting.
