What would be the easiest/cheapest way to monitor internet traffic on a network?

[706]

I do tech support for a medium sized business with several sites. At one of these sites we are currently setting up a fortigate firewall which I believe has the ability to monitor internet traffic. The IT manager wishes to use it to see if users are using sites they shouldn't be at work or during office hours and then disable access to these sites.

However we have a secondary site with fewer users where the expense of a fortigate isn't justified, though I would still like to see if there is unwanted internet usage going on. Is there a cheaper router that has the ability to view internet traffic? Or even software, or third party firmware that would give this functionality?

 

[bob442]

you could use wireshark and a switch that has SPAN cappablitys. That would be the cheepist i can think of. But if you truly want to monitor the traffic i would sugest a software like websense, but that will cost you a lil bit.

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

You could pick up something like a Cisco/Linksys RV042 router for a few hundred bucks, then run a free program called WallWatcher that can give you a great detailed log.