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Archive for July, 2009

Convert Microsoft ISA 2006 MSDE logs to WebSpy compatible text logs

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Some customers have experienced issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text using Microsoft’s MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006 (available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=23531736-942f-466c-acb3-861a899d37b4&displaylang=en)

If you convert your logs to text using this script, they won’t import into WebSpy Vantage or Analyzer due to an extra line break in the header of the file (after #fields:).

We’ve therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.

Download the modified MSDEToText script:
MSDEToText.zip -26 KB

Also make sure the file names of your output log files contain the word WEB (for Web Proxy logs) or FWS (for Firewall Logs) as Analyzer and Vantage use these strings to automatically detect the type of ISA log file.

Happy converting!

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Posted in Analyzer, Firewall Analysis, How To, Loaders, Log File Analysis, Microsoft ISA Server, Third Party, Vantage, Web Browsing Analysis, WebSpy | 2 Comments »

Video: How To Remove Clutter From Your Web Reports

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

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. (more…)

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Posted in How To, Log File Analysis, Vantage, Web Browsing Analysis, WebSpy | No Comments »

Business benefits from monitoring and reporting on Internet, email and network log files

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

In previous blogs I have covered why internet access is so important in the workplace, why blocking and filtering should be minimized, and why monitoring is preferred. Today I thought I’d focus on the specific benefits of monitoring and reporting on log files.

To some it might be obvious, but plenty of search queries used by visitors coming to our site contains phrases such as; “Why monitor internet usage important” and “Why analyze log files”.

Majority of benefits directly relate to the network device being monitored so I will structured the business benefits based on this. (more…)

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Posted in Articles, Email Analysis, Firewall Analysis, Log File Analysis, Sales and Marketing, Web Browsing Analysis, Windows Event Logs | No Comments »

Unlocking the Value of your Log Data. 10 tips to help you get started

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

This is a popular WebSpy article that we decided to re-post. Click here to download pdf version.

What can log data do for you?

Organisations today are deploying a variety of security solutions to counter the ever increasing threat to their email and Internet investments. Often, the emergence of new threats spawns solutions by different companies with a niche or a specialty for that specific threat – whether it is a guard against viruses, spam, intrusion detection, Spyware, data leakage or any of the other segments within the security landscape.

This heterogeneous security environment means that there has been a proliferation of log data generated by the various systems or devices. As the number of different log formats increases coupled with the sheer volume of log data, the more difficult it becomes for organisations to turn this data into meaningful business information. (more…)

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Posted in Articles | No Comments »

WebSpy: The Origin and Controversy of the Name

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

The year was 1996 and young(ish) CEO, Jack Andrys, was racking his brain to come up with the perfect name for his business. It was the early stage of the Internet evolution with a shy number of 36 million users, 0.9% of the population. Not much compared to today’s staggering number of 1,596 million users, 23.8% of the population.

The concern for Internet misuse and costly drawbacks in the business arena were gradually rising and proactive Jack could already visualize an increasing need to monitor organizational web resources. Back then the software focused solely on analyzing and reporting on log files produced by proxy servers. Names such as Proxy Analyzer, Log File Reporter, Proxy Log Hog and Web Analyzer entered Jack’s brain but were quickly dismissed. He needed something better, something with more impact, a name that would draw attention, a descriptive name without the dullness, one name that could encompass the software’s functionality and create a conceptual understanding of what the company was all about….one name to rule them all…
(more…)

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Posted in WebSpy, WebSpy News Update | 2 Comments »