Screenshots: How to use Surftrackr

Mar 15th 2008

It's about time I put up some information about how to use Surftrackr, including its more advanced features and the Django admin interface. Here are some screenshots to give you an overview of how to use Surftrackr - stay tuned for details of using the admin interface.

 
The Surftrackr front-page includes statistics about your proxy logs.
The menus at the top of the screen are customisable per-user.
 
 
 
Here's the list of users. You can click on the numbers to see details of websites and web addresses
visited. Click on the column labels (eg Websites or URLs) to sort by that column. Clicking on Images will show
a page containing all the images viewed by a user. 
 
 
 
 
This is a list of all web addresses visited. All links are clickable, and the code to the right of the address
(200) shows that the requests were successful. The pale-blue star to the left of each address is clickable,
allowing you to highlight a web address for later attention.
 
 
 
This shows the websites visited by a user. If a site has a hilite (see below for details) that information is
shown in the right-hand column. Surftrackr lets you apply hilites to a site, or to its parent site. Again,
all links are clickable, so you can quickly visit any websites you're not sure about.
 
 
 
This is the list of images. Nothing controversial here, but it's very easy to find unauthorised use of your web
proxy just by skimming through the images.
 
 
 
 
The search page lets you search web addresses for key-words.
 
 
 
 
 
The search term is highlighted in the results, except for the last one, the address of which is
truncated because it's too long for the page. Note that the 403 code indicates that most
of the images were blocked. Again, the links are clickable ...
 
 
 
 
*Cough* Not so controversial after all :)
 
 
 
 
 
Here's the list showing all hilites and the number of web addresses they match. Surftrackr allows you to enter
your own hilites via the admin interface.
 
 
 
 
 
These are lexicons, which are similar to hilites but are applied to an entire web address. Hilites apply only
to websites, allowing you to divide them into categories for policy enforcement purposes. Lexicons identify
words in the web address which might indicate an infringement. 
 
 
 
 
 
When viewing lexicon matches, the word in question is highlighted in red, and the links are clickable.
 
 
 
 
Each web address accessed has a status indicating whether it was blocked, allowed, not found, etc. The
Statuses page allows you to see how many are in each category. Clicking on the 403 code will show you
all blocked accesses, which might help you find out which of your users has been trying to circumvent
your filtering software.
 
 
 
 
These are all the blocked web accesses. Some of them (most of those above) are completely innocuous.
This sort of information can be valuable when trying to tune your web filtering software - in this case, it's
clearly being over-zealous. 
 
 
 
 
You can also see the type of resources downloaded, although the trend towards 'clean' web addresses (eg /news/
rather than /news.html) makes it a bit awkward to tell in all cases what kind of resource was downloaded. Where
it is possible, however, you can get a quick overview of the kind of traffic travelling through your proxy.
 
 
 
 
This is a list of all images accessed by all users.
 
 
 
 
Flagged users can be viewed from this page.
 
 
 
 
You can also create groups of users and view graphs of all traffic for the group. Flagged users are automatically
included in the 'Flagged Users' group.
 
 
 
 
This graph shows the traffic by byte. You can also view it by number of items downloaded, and use a bar
chart instead of a pie chart. Note that this feature uses Google Charts, so you need to be connected to the
Internet to use it.