Client is requesting an additional feature in Dashboard showing the top sites visited for the past hour including the number of visitors and hit counts.

One of the items that I struggle with is keeping informed of the demand that is placed on our Internet appliance. I would dearly love to have a dashboard component that would show me the top 5 or 10 web sites that are being visited for the last 30 or 60 minutes, including how many employees have visited the site or the number of hits on that site.

This would help my team be more proactive and respond quicker to potential peaks in demand.

"Once I have run a Category report from the Policy and Content section, I would like to take the top categories and chart them (say in a line graph) by time to see when our employees are visiting these categoies.
I would also like to run a report by category when I wish to know if I should block a site for example: games. If game sites are being visited after hours or during lunch, then that is quite acceptable, but if it were during work hours I need to restrict access."

a) How will this new feature address your business requirements?

This report will part of a process that help us to understand where the bandwidth at our sites is being used. We will run this report on sites that have a high utilisation going to the internet. If the traffic is legitimate and during business hours, then we will need to increase the bandwidth at that site. If the traffic to the internet is not work related, but is after hours or during lunch, then we may still need to increase bandwidth. If the traffic is not work related, and is during business hours and adding to the high utilisation, then we will have to address this another way.

b) How would you rate the importance of this feature, 1 being critical to your business and 5 being a nice-to-have?

I would rate this feature as a 1 - Critical. We have not run reports from the Sophos appliance before now, and I find myself struggling to extract the data that will be of benefit to us. Currently, we only block the inappropriate sites and we are of the belief that since our staff work so hard and such long hours, that it is only fair to give them access to the internet for personal use. As a growing global company with 4000 employees drilling down to individuals is not really an option. We would prefer to look at the categories that our people are using and the time that they are browsing these categories and manage the bandwidth that way.