What's new in GFI WebMonitor™ 2012?

Released: March 8, 2012

GFI WebMonitor – All editions

Brand new look for greater ease of use

The latest version of GFI WebMonitor features a completely redesigned new look which is far easier to use and interact with. The new design gives you quicker access to what you need in a simpler, faster manner. The new look manifests itself in a series of changes throughout the product; including smart dashboards, policy screens and an in-built reporting engine.

Smart dashboards

GFI WebMonitor 2012 makes it easy to give permission to selected users outside the IT department to generate and access reports thanks to the its brand new ‘Smart Dashboards’, which are grouped into three areas: Activity dashboards, bandwidth dashboards and real-time traffic dashboards.

Activity dashboards

The activity dashboards present an interactive report showing browsing activity and surfing time, which allows users to drill down into specific details to analyze issues by:

• Seeing which categories are the highest productivity losers
• Filtering by all activity/blocked activity
• Listing the websites that are causing the highest productivity loss
• Listing which users are spending too much time browsing non-productive websites
• Revealing users who are visiting inappropriate websites
• Offering an exact log of visits by website, category or user
• Ranking users based on browsing activity
• Highlighting peak browsing activity days.

Bandwidth dashboards

These interactive dashboards reveal download and upload volumes to identify whether certain websites, categories or users are creating download or upload bottlenecks. The data can be analyzed in detail by:

• Showing which category is causing most bandwidth drain
• Filtering by downloads and/or uploads
• Revealing which users or websites are consuming too much bandwidth
• Monitoring generic bandwidth trends and spikes
• Predicting the consumption of bandwidth levels based on current activity
• Highlighting peak bandwidth consumption days.

Real-time traffic dashboards

Gone are the days when you had to wait for reports to be generated in retrospect: GFI WebMonitor 2012 introduces interactive display and filtering of data on real-time connections to give you the ability to drill down to categories, websites or users which are causing specific issues.

This dashboard also presents a visual representation of the activity going on at any given time, including a real-time graph of bandwidth consumption. You can monitor specific categories of connections and even terminate rogue ones at will – for example, if you happen to be alerted to a dubious download or streaming media connections.

Policy screens

The new version of GFI WebMonitor facilitates the creation of policies by centralizing them in a single screen. You can now see all policy implementation details on one screen, without needing to switch tabs. It is also much easier to define policies by risk as categories have now been grouped by generic needs and functions, such as:

• Security
• Productivity loss
• Bandwidth control
• Application or archive (for downloads).

In-built reporting engine

The completely revamped interface now allows you to create reports based on the information you require without ever having to leave the main program. The new reporting engine makes it much easier to extract reports which only include the data you need, through the easy inclusion and exclusion of users, categories and websites.

The new reporting engine enables you to create:

• Department-based reports, which can be scheduled and sent to the relevant department heads
• Reports which only include certain categories of websites
• Reports which exclude certain data (such as salesforce.com or your corporate website)
• Need-based reports, such as reports based on browsing activity/bandwidth /security. You can, for example, set GFI WebMonitor to automatically notify the IT administrator when somebody is hogging bandwidth; notify HR management if somebody is browsing job-search websites; or to notify a particular manager if somebody in their team is spending too much time on websites which are in the productivity-loss category. This way, each report is concise and relevant to the person who required it.
• Schedules and to distribute reports in various formats.

Action-based alerts

GFI WebMonitor 2012 makes it possible for you, or members of the management team, to receive alerts when specific issues arise. Its alerting features are very flexible, enabling you to set them up based on particular triggers, such as somebody browsing non-productive websites for long periods or an employee actively seeking a job.

SQL Server Support

GFI WebMonitor now supports using SQL Server or SQL Server Express as its logging database. Although this is not a requirement, using a new or existing installation of SQL Server or SQL Server Express (which is free) provides improved performance for installations where high volumes of data are generated and retrieved.

GFI WebMonitor - WebFilter Edition

Search engine monitoring

Monitoring what users are searching for in major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) helps you identify potential issues such as employees making frequent use of job-related searches or researching bomb-making, terrorism and other suspicious activity. Carefully monitoring search engine terms can even provide a good indication of the general mood of the organization.

More information about GFI Webmonitor:

Overview | Features | Download FREE Trial | Pricing