Network traffic shaping, understanding if a video is being watched from Facebook

Question

I am tring to determine which web sites are being used, how frequently they are being used, how much data transfer occurs etc.., in my company network .

Now my problem when someone is watching a video; for example a video served by youtube from Facebook. I need to understand the video is opened from Facebook. I took some pcap files and examined them but couldn't find out any useful information for my case in http headers. I were excepting to find out something about facebook in http get messages for youtube but unfortunately nothing was there .

I hope I explain my case well enough. Will somebody has any advise for me?

Answer 1

1. There should be a Referer header that says the URL in the original request to YouTube.

2. You're probably trying to solve a management problem with technology. If the problem is that all your bandwidth is taken up, then implement some simple traffic shaping by data usage.

   If you think there's a problem with people surfing the Internet (ie "wasting time" on Facebook), you are probably wrong. Most businesses pay employees for their output, the results they produce. They do no pay employees just for being present. If the employees are producing the required output, then it should not matter how much they surf the Internet, they are getting their work done (if they can surf all day and still get their work done, kudos to them).

   Most commonly the problem is that the employees are being paid for their output, but are not getting their work done. It really don't matter if they're on Facebook or hanging around the water-cooler. Not getting your work done should be unacceptable and those employees should be warned then terminated if they still can't get their work done. Note, none of that last bit involves technology, it's all management.

   I sympathize if your management sucks and is trying to force technology into the wrong roll, but I guarantee technology can not solve this problem. You can outright block all non-essential Internet access, people will congregate around the water-cooler. Take away the water-cooler, people will stare at their desk for hours on end. If they don't want to work, you will spend more effort trying to make them work than what you get out of them. And there's plenty of studies to back that up.