SonicWall filtering

[kirbster73]

Hi all,

 

We have a Dell Sonicwall which we are extremely happy with for filtering, however, we struggle to get decent reports out of it regarding users and websites they visit. Do anyone have any experience of SonicWall and can they recommend how we can get these reports in a readable fashion from it. We've also had a trial of Fastvue, which is great for telling us about file downloads etc, but again doesn't seem to give us user by users reports for their usage?

 

Perhaps we're doing something wrong but I'd love to hear from anyone who's got it working.

 

Thanks,

[Norphy]

My former colleague @Roberto uses SonicWALL and has just extended the contract with them. He was telling me about the fancy reporting package they've got. Rob?

[Roberto]

Cheers Norphy. @kirbster73 We were very doubtful about the native reporting in Sonicwall. It's probably ok for a business but totally unsuited to education needs imo.

 

However, as you know, Sonicwall is one of the systems that the fastvue reporting server can talk to, and the reporting in fastvue is superb in my opinon. We've handed our safeguarding team their own logins to our fastvue box and (with support if necessary) leaving them to get on with things because it's easy for non-technical people to use, and they're very happy with the per user reporting. Not sure what you mean exactly by "user by user" but we can generate detailed reports of user activity on request or on a schedule.

 

I love it. Given the focus on Safeguarding by inspectors (rightly so imho) and the poor features inbuilt in Sonicwall, I'm sure @Norphy will remember and back me up on how we were very dubious at the prospect of inspectors coming and focusing on that area but now myself and the safeguarding team are feeling quite confident about this. Bring it on!

Edited March 7, 2017 by Roberto

[kirbster73]

Hi Roberto, maybe we're doing something wrong, but I can't seem to get useable data out of fastvue when I'm looking at a single user's usage. For example, last week, I was using code.org in my class, yet when I ran a report on my usage, I got nothing back for that timeframe. Is there something really obvious that we're missing? I know it's hard to discuss without knowing our set up but we'd appreciate any insight you could give us.

[Roberto]

Hi Roberto, maybe we're doing something wrong, but I can't seem to get useable data out of fastvue when I'm looking at a single user's usage. For example, last week, I was using code.org in my class, yet when I ran a report on my usage, I got nothing back for that timeframe. Is there something really obvious that we're missing? I know it's hard to discuss without knowing our set up but we'd appreciate any insight you could give us.

 

First things first, are you sure that you're being correctly authenticated on that computer? Are you sure the Sonicwall is seeing the right attempts to access sites itself? If the Sonicwall is not managing to authenticate you then it can't tie your usage in that session to your account. I think this would be where I'd look (sonicwall auth and/or logging) rather than Fastvue - Fastvue just reports what it is sent, if it isn't sent good logs it can't generate good data.

Edited March 7, 2017 by Roberto