Internet Content Filtering: MOREnet-hosted - Reporting Options

MOREnet Technical Support will configure Internet Content Filtering reports of your choice upon your request.

Reports can be sent at regular intervals or as a one time request. Reports can be scheduled for daily generation (e-mailed at midnight) or weekly generation (e-mailed on midnight on Sunday). Reports will be automatically e-mailed to an address you choose. Reports cannot be reliably e-mailed to the aol.com domain.

Reports are configured for a single subnet range. If your institution has multiple non-contiguous ranges, each range will be configured and forwarded to you in a separate report. By default, Technical Support will configure reports for all of the IPs in assigned subnets and all subnets assigned to the Ethernet interface on the institution's node router.

The number of results in the report is also customizable, allowing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 results to be returned. The default result total is 50.

Technical Support can create custom reports on the fly for date ranges you specify. Reports can be sent to you in HTML format. Activity logs are kept for two weeks.

Report Types

MOREnet Technical Support customarily recommends scheduling a daily category activity report and a weekly site activity report for each IP range in the network.

Category Activity

Category activity reports show the Bess categories that received the most requests on your network during the time period you specify. The number of site requests (pages) per category is broken down by action (Block, Warn, Bypass, Override, Monitor and Allow), in an easy to read graph format. Results can be shown per day or per week.

Example of category activity report

Site Activity

Site activity reports show the websites that received the most requests on your network during the time period you specify. The report can also be customized to track a single category, like advertisements, to pinpoint high volume sites that may be beneficial to custom block or custom allow. Results can be shown per day or per week.

Example of site activity report

Time-based Activity

Time-based activity reports show the number of sites requested during the period you specify. The number of site requests (pages) per day or hour is broken down by action (Block, Warn, Bypass, Override, Monitor and Allow). The report can also be customized to track a single category. Time-based activity reports can help you identify when the busiest periods of Web activity are on your network, as well as pinpoint when certain types of activity are taking place. This report is especially helpful if Bess is configured to use scheduled filter changes to apply different filters at certain times of the day. Results must be configured by day.

Example of time-based activity report

Detailed User Activity

Detailed user activity reports document each website access requested by an IP address, the dates and times that the site was requested, the action taken on the request (Block, Warn, Bypass, Override, Monitor and Allow) and the reason for the action (usually the Bess category of the site). Results are returned in consecutive chronological order, with the most recent access first. Since these reports contain so much data, MOREnet suggests that configuration of this report be limited to a single action (Block, Warn, Bypass, Override, Monitor and Allow), be increased to 100 or 500 results and compiled and sent daily for best results.

Detailed user activity reports can be very useful for pinpointing and documenting problem activity by showing you exactly how a computer tied to a particular IP address in your organization is using the Web.

Example of detailed user activity report

Use of Network Address Translation (NAT) in the network can prevent individual IP addresses from being distinguished in the report data. See http://www.more.net/services/filter/morenet.html#nat for more information on implementation of NAT and Internet Content Filtering implementation.