I've been asked to start monitoring the internet usage in the company.

I appreciate they are two different things, but do people have opinions on:

1) The cheapest option
2) The most useful from an administrative & reporting perspective

The internet lines are a cable modem and an ADSL conenction. Both currently go into a router (allowing for failover & firewall) and then shared to the network.

Any help will be appreciated.

cheers
Andy

 

If you had an old PC, you could stick something free on it like Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/) and just use the Proxy feature. It monitors all traffic through it, so you could use it in series with your existing firewall or configure it as a standalone proxy server.

There's loads of add-ons that allow anti-virus scanning, additional reporting features and so on - http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/

Stefan