Office Network Activity report

[Cemozi]

Hi People;
Since Eigth month I'm working in a new office.
My Manager asked me how we can monitor office computer activity .
We have arround 15 pc in office and sometime someone is draining the internet. No one took responsibility. My manager now wants to see who does what on internet?
Is there Program that creates report for those activies or do we need a type of a network device?

 

[boosted1g]

I mean no offense but if neither you nor your manager knows what even allows you to view network activity logs then you would not be able to read the logs even if you had them.

There is several approaches between reactive monitoring to proactive filtering and bandwidth allocation.
In either case this should be setup by a professional who understands what they are doing.

 

[Cemozi]

the privacy Of people is very important for me . But i have to give right to my manager too. One of his employee wasting time during the work hours. Plus he prevent allmost the others reach to internet.
I'm good at hardware and im skilled with some programs like illustrator. but have to admit have less knowledge about network.

 

[Ralston18]

It is good of you to respect people's privacy. However, in a work environment things are a bit different.

In a small office such as yours there is a very good chance that you and your manager have a "suspect" in mind.

However, to be fair, check all of the computers without notice during off-hours.

Visit that employee's computer and check the browsing history. Check the activity levels via the Network Adapter card's status window. Look for non-work related downloaded files. Unauthorized appliations or system configuration changes.

(Note: some people may know enough to clear their browsing history or maybe each computer is configured to do so automatically.)

Anyway, see what you can find and then have a quiet meeting with the applicable offender(s). Then put out a written company policy to everyone regarding the proper and allowed use of company owned devices. You can find some example policies online. Then seek legal counsel to modify the policy as needed for your company and country laws.

If doing the above does not put a stop to the problem then you need to proceed as recommended by boosted1g.

However, your office still needs to have a policy that supports the firing of offenders or at least repeat offenders.

 

[boosted1g]

One other thing to keep in mind is that if some of your machines are running windows 10 then they may be downloading the new Win 10 update.
EACH computer running windows 10 will download a 4GB file for the new version of Win 10 and this can really slow down a small business network that does not have much reasources to go around.
Unfortunatly there is only 3 ways to fix said problem and 2 of them are not really solutions:
1) Pay big money to have all systems on Win 10 Enterprise and your own upgrade server
2) Have Win 10 Pro/Enterprise on all computers and dissable all automatic updates (bad idea unless you will hav ea fulltime staff member to manually apply updates)
3) Block access to Microsoft update server at your router's firewall (also bad idea)

 

[boosted1g]

the privacy Of people is very important for me . But i have to give right to my manager too. One of his employee wasting time during the work hours. Plus he prevent allmost the others reach to internet.
I'm good at hardware and im skilled with some programs like illustrator. but have to admit have less knowledge about network.

It has nothing to do with intentions or concerns; it simply comes down to the fact that logs are useless if you dont understand them (which means you could point fingers at the wrong person),; and any more proactive measures could cripple your network if done incorrectly. Bottom line if this is hurting the business's ability to make revenue then it is worth the cost to get a professional to setup reactive and proactive logs/policys; having novice people play around with things they are not familiar with can cause way more harm then good and cost A LOT more to the company then the cost of the IT service. I have been called in to fix botched DIY jobs many times; the vast majority of time setting up what they wanted in the first place was only 20-30% of the bill, the rest was diagnosing and fixing what they messed up. This is just my portion, no idea what they lost in revenue while they were down.

Again this is nothing personal towards you. There is a time and place for learning new skills and playing with things outside of comfort zone; when it is for a business and can make the problem much worse is not one of those times though.
Any experienced, educated business manager should not be asking his employees to do tasks outside of their skillset when downtime/revenue loss is on the line.