US 2004/0073533 A1 · Internet traffic tracking and reporting system

Abstract

A reporting system and method that works with conventional network management systems to provide long term tracking capability for all network conversations with data provided by, e.g., a company owned commercial software system. The conventional network management system gathers the data frames and a data file is exported after a collection of network conversations that contains only the information needed for reporting. Such information may include, e.g., times, dates, computer addresses, and counters. This data is captured by the reporting system of the invention, filtered, normalized, and stored in a database in such a fashion that unique searches may be applied to the stored data to provide the network administrator with detailed information concerning the usage of the data by particular individuals, the usage of certain data ports, and how much traffic to a specific site on the Internet is generated by network users.

Claims12

Dependent claims

An Internet traffic tracking and reporting system for a local network, comprising:

a network probe that captures data identifying data traffic to or from any of the nodes on the local network and outputs the captured data on a periodic basis;
a reports database;
a reporting system that imports the captured data output by the network probe, normalizes the captured data, stores the normalized data in the reports database;
and provides an interface to a user for querying the normalized data in the reports database;
and
an input/output device that enables the user to access the reporting system's interface and to provide search queries into the data stored in the search database, whereby the user may query the reports database to sort the stored data by at least one of date, time, destination web site, originating computer from which a network connection was initiated, and data transfer size.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Internet traffic tracking and reporting system

Life of this patent

Internet traffic tracking and reporting system

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims12