Basic Guide for the Webroot Web SaaS Portal
This is a basic guide for the Webroot Web SaaS Portal. Webroot is a cloud based Web filtering and protection service that acts as an effective shield against malware and viruses before they hit your network, while allowing you to effectively control and manage your Internet resources with content filtering and access policies.
When you have registered and put Webroot in place against your network, you will have access to the SecureAnywhere Web Security Service portal. In this guide we will run through some of the basic features of this portal.
Understanding the home page
When you first log into Webroot, you are greeted with the home page. The top portion of this page is the Notifications area, which contain up to date news about new features, bug fixes, proposed changes etc. If you are happy that you are up to date with the latest information then you can shrink this section down by clicking the folder icon in the bottom right of that window, giving way to a comprehensive Statistics section.
The Statistics section (which can also be reached by going to the Statistics > Charts menu) contains 6 handy graphs or charts that gives you live information about the ins and out of what Webroot is doing for you.
Hourly Bandwidth Usage – This graph displays how much web data is passing over your Internet connection, with the usage in MB going up on the left, and dates and times going along the bottom. The default view is to break it down for a few snapshots per day and displaying the last couple of days usage, but by clicking the Reset To Today Only icon in the top right of this window, you can get a more in depth analysis of what has been occurring on that particular day. You can also click the Table View button here which will bring down a table underneath the graph that breaks down the number even further with exact numbers in MB and percentage statistics.
Top 10 Blocked Site Categories – This bar chart gives you a breakdown of what the top classification of websites being blocked in the last 24 hours are, so for example you could see how much of a disruption Social Networking or News & Media websites are to your network traffic. Again this chart can be broken down deeper by clicking the Table View button in the top right.
Top 10 Blocks Malware Name – This chart gives you a breakdown of the top 10 pieces of malware, by name, that have been prevented in the last 24 hours. Unless you have been having serious problems on your network, this chart shouldn’t normally be over populated with information.
Top 10 Users By Bandwidth – A very handy pie chart that displays who has been transmitting and receiving the most data in the last 24 hours by percentage. Usage it broken down by username so you can see exactly the named user who has been soaking up the most bandwidth. By clicking the Table View button you can see how much each of those users has been using in MB and the total in GB that has been used in the last 24 hours.
Top 10 Blocked Domains – This bar chart shows you the top 10 URLs that have been blocked by Webroot in the last 24 hours. By clicking the Table View button on this chart you can see exactly how many page requests have been attempted to each one and the total amount of blocked page requests.
Top Search Engine String – This box contains the most popular words or phrases that have been entered into search engines by users on your network in the last 24 hours. By clicking the Table View you can see exactly which are the most popular, broken down into how many times each has been searched for.
Groups and Users Menu
The Groups and Users menu is where your clients are defined and, if you so wish, grouped together in conveniently defined lists.
By clicking Groups and Users > Users you are able to see a full list of all of the clients who are defined for your network. Each user is defined by their email address, which is also their username. You can also see here what their Windows login name is, any groups of policies that they are connected to, and how they are connecting to Webroot – either by the client software or via proxy. You can edit each user and activate/deactivate them but you should refer to the Admin Guide documentation before embarking on any of these features.
The Groups and Users > Groups menu lets you assign individual clients from the Users menu into separate lists, making it easier for you to manage departments or sections of your network more conveniently.
Groups that you have defined then have Policies applied next to them, which is how you control who has access to what and where and when.
Policies Menu
The policies menu is the meat of where Webroot does most of its work with regards to resource management and control. When you have all of your users added and split into convenient groups, this is where you control what each individual group can see and do. This is only a basic guide so we won’t go into depth here, but if you are a user of Webroot and wish to learn in detail about how the policies work, please refer to the Working with Policies section of the Webroot Admin Guide.
In depth interrogation of your usage using logs
While the Home Page and Statistics section contain very handy charts and general breakdowns of usage, they won’t really help you if you are looking for something specific, especially if that something is legacy and happened a matter of days or weeks ago.
Going to the Statistics > Logs menu enables you to fully interrogate at a deep level what has been happening on your network. Familiarising yourself with this menu is key to being able find problems effectively. Here you can search by group, date time, IP address, username, specific strings of text, even by size in KB in MB. You can also setup a scheduled log report by clicking the Schedule Log button, which will run a specific set of search criteria at user defined times and dump the output into a report which will then be emailed to you.