This menu allows you to enable Web Usage monitoring between the LAN and the Internet, and view tables of both Recently Visited Websites and Recent Web Searches.

This can be useful, if you have concerns about users' Web browsing patterns. Parents often use this to monitor/supervise their childrens' browsing habits, or just to gather statistics. (Default Disabled). Since release 2020.6, Web Monitoring also works for secure (https) websites.

Enable: Clicking the word Enable » takes you to the Logging menu, where you can enable and configure the Web Monitor function.

Once Web Monitoring is enabled, it displays the Recently Visited Web Sites table.

Clicking » Download lets you download the Recently Visited Website list in plain text format to save to your PC or client device.

Clicking » Clear will delete the current list contents, allowing you to reset or start logging again from scratch.

You may not recognize some domains in the table. That's because they are for data harvesting, displaying ads, program updating, caching content and other purposes that users are generally not made aware of.

Note that if you use a VPN, Web Monitor will not function properly, since domains you enter will be encrypted when travelling through the VPN tunnel. If you use routing policy and allow the web browser to bypass the VPN, domains you enter should be listed in the table.

To disable Web Usage, click on » Web Monitor Configuration near the bottom right of the menu. This takes you to the Logging menu. There, uncheck Monitor Web Usage to disable Web Usage.

Generally speaking, this function is mostly obsolete. It relied on web links being unencrypted to gather the data it needed. Now that most web connections are (SSL/TLS) encrypted, it cannot gather the data needed to present any results. It will therefore remain empty unless a search engine is used via an unencrypted connection.

As a substitute, dnsmasq supports the log-queries configuration option. If you add this option into the Dnsmasq custom configuration field in the DHCP/DNS/TFTP menu, you will be able to see what domains have been resolved by consulting the logs.