Summary #

When having a problem accessing a website there are 3 logs that you can look at to help you determine what is preventing access to the website.

More Information #

The 3 logs are the Filter Log, Access Denied Log and Auth Fail Log. Each giving you different information about what may be causing the problem with the website.

• The Filter Log is the first place to start. You can search by User, IP Address, or Website and search for just Blocked Messages or Successful Messages. Searching by IP address will give you the best results because then you know you are looking at everything in the filter log for that device. Most of the time you will find that a site is being blocked because it is a banned site and you will have to allow access to that site. You may also see blocked messages for Social Media sites (ex. FaceBook or Twitter) as most websites have links on the their home page. They can be ignored for the most part since the only thing will not load is the icon for the Social Media Site.
• The Access Denied Log is the next place to look, searching by IP address will give you the most accurate results. This log displays any attempts by end users to access a website on a blocked port, like 443/https. More and more websites are requiring secure communications and you want to be careful when allowing a site to be accessed over https/443 since we can not filter the content on that site because the communications are encrypted.
• The Auth Fail Log, the last place to look, and again searching by IP address will give you the most accurate results. If you are using Authentication, this log will display any website that had a issue with Proxy Authentication. You want to be careful adding sites to the Authentication Exception list, since any user will be able to access that site regardless of user group because we will no longer require the user to authenticate to gain access to that site.