8 02, 2010

8 Reasons NOT to Use Microsoft Forefront TMG's Reporting

By | 2010-02-08T06:48:39+00:00 February 8th, 2010|Aliases, Firewall Analysis, How To, Loaders, Log File Analysis, Microsoft ISA Server, Microsoft Threat Management Gateway, Reports, Tips and Best Practices, Uncategorized, Vantage, Web Browsing Analysis, Web Module, WebSpy|6 Comments

I've been having a look through the reporting functionality included in Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway to find that not much has changed from ISA Server 2006. There is some new information regarding the newly implemented URL categorization and threat management technology, but there is very little flexibility or customization for those with reporting requirements beyond general overviews cluttered with irrelevant information. Here is what I consider to be the 8 main limitations of Microsoft Forefront TMG's reporting functionality.

14 08, 2009

Increase importing speed by utilizing dates in log file names

By | 2009-08-14T06:21:10+00:00 August 14th, 2009|How To, Log File Analysis, Uncategorized, Vantage, WebSpy|0 Comments

Using Date Modifiers in file masks are a great way to increase the speed of your imports as they remove all the logs you don’t care about from the import list. If you're using WebSpy Vantage, you are probably interested in filtering your log file imports by date (only import files from the month of June for example). The obvious way to do this is to specify a date filter using the filters page in the Input Wizard. The problem is Vantage will still check every record in every log file being imported to see if it matches the date filter. If you have months or years worth of logs in the folder being imported, that's a lot of data that Vantage has to pointlessly sift through. The good news is, if your log files contain the date in their file name, then you can use file masks to instruct Vantage to never touch these unwanted files.

16 07, 2009

Video: How To Remove Clutter From Your Web Reports

By | 2009-07-16T09:10:02+00:00 July 16th, 2009|How To, Log File Analysis, Uncategorized, Vantage, Web Browsing Analysis, WebSpy|0 Comments

I was conducting a demonstration the other day on how to use a few tricks in WebSpy Vantage to filter out noise and clutter from web reports. If you have ever looked through the raw list of web sites visited by people in your organization, I'm sure you know what I mean. Watching a single video on YouTube will probably generate a list of about three to five sites such as lax-v41.lax.youtube.com, www.youtube.com, img.youtube.com, and so on. Your list of top sites also probably contains hits to ad servers and tracking servers, such as doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com and imrworldwide.com. All this clutter gets in the way of determining what sites were 'intentionally' visited.