Monitoring - How do we know if it is working & foreign languages

[TaylorIT]

Hi all,

 

Would you mind if I ask, what is everyone doing with the monitoring and filtering of foreign languages? Some products seem better than others for foreign language monitoring. The one we use only seems to monitor English and maybe one or two other languages. Obviously with the number of EAL pupils in schools, I am just concerned that we are not meeting our KCSIE/DfE safeguarding requirements by just monitoring in English. The problem is, there are sooo many different languages!

 

It seems that NetSupport and Smoothwall are focusing more on including foreign language libraries than some of their competitors, if I understand correctly.

 

On a different subject, has anyone come across a monitoring solution that alerts us if it goes wrong on a client? I was thinking a bit like Sophos Antivirus when an alert is sent to the management console if it cannot protect a device. My fear is that we install our monitoring software on a pupil laptop, we test it, it works fine, we send it home and it stops monitoring a few hours later, even though it still looks like it is working fine on the management console. Yes, we have seen this happen! If the software was able to self-verify it is working correctly and send an alert back to us if something goes wrong, we can inform the parents.

 

You can imagine the scenario, little John Smith has been searching adult websites on a school device and is now traumatised, the monitoring client stopped working a month ago but the IT Team had no way of knowing! School is still at fault as we should have been regularly testing the monitoring client is working by a keyword test on each client (even though in reality this would be impractical on hundreds of devices, some used off site, managed by a tiny IT team).

 

Even if we checked each device, one at a time each week, and something happened, they would say we need to check them more frequently!

 

Thank you

 

Rich

[dmj]

How would you know if the software that monitors the software is working or returning false positives? You could go on forever.

Ultimately you have to either trust what you bought, or get something that works (ideally with the capability to monitor itself).

It's one of the reasons I prefer network level monitoring rather than device level.

As a first step, at least check the logs for when something does go wrong.

[Joeloman]

I can only answer what concerns the Smoothwall Filter

Outside UK (Sweden)

The language support is very good in Smoothwall and of course they have focused on the most important categories such as suicide etc.

 

Here you will find a list of all languages ​​that Smoothwall Filter currently supports...

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/12780179073052-What-languages-are-supported-by-the-Web-Filter

 

Smoothwall quickly added support for Ukrainianas when refugees began to arrive.

They have also entered Finnish, which only about 5 million people speak.

 

I don't think you need to worry about the function if you use Smoothwall Cloud Filter.

The filter sits i.a. in the browser itself and if you have done what you have to do on school computers, the filter will work even if the cloud service goes down.

Edited October 17, 2024 by Joeloman

[sigma]

I have a hard enough time keeping up with English teen slang and euphamisms!

[tom_newton]

There's an "endpoint management" tool coming to Smoothwall monitor soon - it's in beta for filter if anyone would like to play with it. This allows you to see which clients are installed and reporting home. Edited October 17, 2024 by tom_newton

[CHiLL]

There's an "endpoint management" tool coming to Smoothwall monitor soon - it's in beta for filter if anyone would like to play with it. This allows you to see which clients are installed and reporting home.

How does that differ from the web portal where you can see active machines, check-in dates and captures that's been available for years? (I actually don't have access to the portal myself, my manager does - I'm asking on his behalf)

[tom_newton]

How does that differ from the web portal where you can see active machines, check-in dates and captures that's been available for years? (I actually don't have access to the portal myself, my manager does - I'm asking on his behalf)

 

It is the 2.0 evolution of that - waiting for the monitor client team to support it is why it's not ready for public consumption yet

[CrootUK]

There's an "endpoint management" tool coming to Smoothwall monitor soon - it's in beta for filter if anyone would like to play with it. This allows you to see which clients are installed and reporting home.

 

Would love to see the installed agent version of cloud filter for windows instead of/management of extensions.

Edited October 18, 2024 by CrootUK

[tom_newton]

You'll always want an agent AND extension, as agents find it hard to see what's going on inside the browser, but management of same is getting easier, and we are slowly building a toolset to manage both.

[CrootUK]

An agent that would manage and ensure the extension is on different types of browsers that might be installed and configure it so the extension is unable to be disable etc and also pickup traffic outside of the browser etc would be ideal, think we spoke about this before and you mentioned it was coming.

 

being able to just push some software out rather than relying on multiple policies to configure a multitude of different browsers would make life much easier, but even then so many apps have built in browsers like google earth, maps, onenote that filtering beyond the browser is needed too unfortunately (nothings easy!)

 

we go live with trustwide smoothwall next week, happy to try anything you have after! (This has side tracked OP, I am sorry)!

Edited October 21, 2024 by CrootUK

[CHiLL]

You'll always want an agent AND extension, as agents find it hard to see what's going on inside the browser, but management of same is getting easier, and we are slowly building a toolset to manage both.

So we should really be deploying the Smoothwall Monitor application and the Chromium extension to devices? This is the first we're hearing that there's a browser extension!

[tom_newton]

Sorry - for the filter there's a browser extension, Monitor is agent only.