Chapter 19
Kerio StaR — statistics and reporting
The WinRoute’s web interface provides detailed statistics on users, volume of transferred data, visited websites and web categories. This information may help figure out browsing activities and habits of individual users.
The statistics monitor the traffic between the local network and the Internet. Volumes of data transferred between local hosts and visited web pages located on local servers are not included in the statistics (also for technical reasons).
One of the benefits of web statistics and reports is their high availability. The user (usually an office manager) does not need the Administration Console and they even do not need WinRoute administrator rights (special rights are used for statistics). Statistics viewed in web browsers can also be easily printed or saved on the dick as web pages.
Notes:
1.The WinRoute administrator should inform users that their browsing activities are monitored by the firewall.
2.Statistics and reports in WinRoute should be used for reference only. It is highly unrecommended to use them for example to figure out exact numbers of Internet connection costs per user.
19.1 Monitoring and storage of statistic data
Diverse data is needed to be gathered for the statistics. Statistic data is stored in the database (the star subdirectory of the WinRoute’s installation directory — for details, see chapter 23.2). Total period length for which WinRoute keeps the statistics can be set in the Accounting section of the Administration Console (see chapter 19.2). By default, this time is set to 24 months (i.e. 2 years).
For technical reasons, the WinRoute Firewall Engine stores gathered statistic data in the cache (the star\cache subdirectory) and data is recorded in the database once per hour. The cache is represented by several files on the disk. This implies that any data is kept in the cache even if the WinRoute Firewall Engine is stopped or another problem occurs (failure of power supply, etc.) though not having been stored in the database yet.
The statistics use data from the main database. This implies that current traffic of individual users is not included in the statistics immediately but when the started period expires and the data is written in the database.
