How to Report on YouTube Activity with Fastvue TMG Reporter

A common concern for network administrators is how to manage traffic to high bandwidth sites. YouTube.com is one specific site that network administrators need to watch closely. The site holds a wealth of information, but it also holds many distractions. HD movie trailers and funny cat videos can quickly drain both your organization's bandwidth and online productivity.

This video takes you through how to use Fastvue TMG Reporter to report on YouTube.com, and how to create a report that provides a simple list of all the videos that people have watched. It also dives a little deeper into how YouTube streaming works to help you better understand the detailed information in TMG Reporter's activity reports.

Reporting on YouTube with Fastvue TMG Reporter

UPDATE (January 24 2014)

I've discovered in recent weeks that youtube.com is now delivering its streaming content from the googlevideo.com domain.

If you open up the developer tools in your browser, go to the network tab and watch a youtube video, you'll see googlevideo.com URLs start to fly by. They look exactly like the ones mentioned in my video above, only instead of starting with youtube.com, they're now hosted on the googlevideo.com domain. For example:

https://r13---sn-nx57ynl7.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?algorithm=throttle-factor&burst=40&clen=2924372&cpn=XK_FYFGwgJzP7t2i&dur=184.087&expire=1390574803&factor=1.25&fexp=900356%2C910812%2C937404%2C936910%2C936913%2C907231%2C3300093%2C3300104%2C3300133%2C3300137%2C3300161%2C3310627%2C3310649%2C3312016&gir=yes&id=95072acaa95f9c2e&ip=24.18.203.162&ipbits=0&itag=140&keepalive=yes&key=yt5&lmt=1389144392795076&ms=au&mt=1390551035&mv=m&range=712704-950271&ratebypass=yes&signature=F2A7A248BC8E91FC96CFC98B64BE6EB810CDCBA7.A1AEDF065B4C88581D2F4A9E62F00BD000639B28&source=youtube&sparams=algorithm%2Cburst%2Cclen%2Cdur%2Cfactor%2Cgir%2Cid%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Clmt%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&sver=3&upn=300NIjRfmMg

This complicates things a little as you will now see a large amount of traffic associated with googlevideo.com when it really is youtube.com being browsed. However, this does not affect the method of retrieving a simple list of video URLs as mentioned in the video above (filtering on Site URL 'contains' youtube.com/watch)

We're looking at ways to address this (see my other articles on the WebSpy site to get the general idea: Making Sensible Employee Internet Reports for the Modern Web), but I can't give you an accurate ETA on it just yet.

If you have any questions about reporting on YouTube.com, or if you have other specific reporting requirements, don't hesitate to get in touch.

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