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i am not a networking pro. my network admin wants to know the ways we can monitor internet usage by employees. my office systems have mostly ubuntu 12.04/14.04 and some windows 7 pcs. can i find a monitoring application which supports both win7 and ubuntu. i found few here which has only linux support. we are using wifi and LAN connection using 3 routers. is there any application to install in every system? or at router level is there any way to configure such monitoring?

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If you just need to know your internet link usage, at router level you can use an SNMP application to monitor your WAN port (such as Nagios). But if you need to know how much of your internet link each user is consuming you will need a proxy or firewall. You cannot monitor it by installing a software on the client side, because you will monitor the LAN traffic also.

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While I do agree with the comments that have been left, you can do this with a tool such as ntop (http://www.ntop.org/), ntopng (http://www.ntop.org/products/ntop/), or go with a linux distro such as the Network Security Toolkit (http://www.networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html) - all of which are free! BTW - the Network Security Toolkit contains both ntop and ntopng as well as just about every network monitoring tool i've ever heard of in a single easy to use linux distro, so I would check that one out first if I were you.

Luckily for you, TCP/IP is not operating system dependent! That is why it has been adopted as the defacto standard for communication between two networked devices.

Now, when you say "only has linux support", what that means is the software is linux based, but any networking monitoring tool can monitor traffic from Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Solaris, or any operating system that communicates using the TCP/IP stack. It's not like you need a windows based network monitor for your windows machines, and a linux based one for your ubuntu machines. If that were the case, the world of computers and networking would be a horrible mess of protocols that cant talk to eachother and the internet never would have taken off like it has.

What is slightly concerning is why is your network admin asking other people for suggestions on how to do what he should already know? This stuff is not super advanced networking knowledge, it's like day 1, first class, should be totally obvious to anyone with the words 'network admin' in their job title. While you could totally go with pfSense or SonicWall, I would start off with some of the great free software out there to see if you can figure out the situation first (well, pfSense is free, SonicWall is not however) without having to spend $$$$ on something.

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  • Oh and to answer your question, no you would not have to install this software on every system. If you could install NST on a PC (or VM), connect it to a port on a switch, it will show you network flows, bandwidth usage, protocol usage, incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, anything you could imagine.
    – Richie086
    Sep 1, 2014 at 8:03

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