You can find supplied report templates under the REPORTS menu. Those reports available to run depend on licensed modules installed. All other supplied reports have been deprecated but remain in the Archive folder for backward compatibility.
Report templates
A report template is the structure for a supplied report or custom report. You can create custom report templates tailored to your installation. These can be created from scratch, or you can adjust the content of the supplied report templates to suit your needs. Selecting a template creates a copy of the supplied report template rather than changing the template itself.
Report outputs
When you generate a report is initially, it's rendered as HTML. You can use the Contents menu to navigate to sections within the report. A Back to top link is also provided to reduce scrolling for large reports. Some result data, such as, IP addresses and URLs, can present additional information when you place your mouse cursor over them. This is useful where a long URL is truncated for display purposes. Not all reports and results have this feature. Once generated, you can save the report, change the date range and change the output format.
Other report outputs
You can also save the report to one of the following outputs:
- CSV — Comma separated values
- PDF — Portable document format
- PDFBW — Portable document format, but in black and white only
- TSV — Tab separated values - this is like the .CSV file format but is uses tabs rather than commas.
Drill-down reports
In some supplied reports you can drill down through the data presented for further investigation. Not all reports have this feature. Drill down reports are other supplied reports that can be run by using the same data. You can find drill down reports under the Recent reports section of the Recent and saved page. The list of available drilled down reports is determined by the report group, which you can't change. For example, a report that shows the amount of traffic used by the top IP addresses, drills down to show the bandwidth usage for one of the IP addresses. A report that shows the number of times a website has been requested, drills down to show the URL that was requested, or which users visited the site.
Note: Drill down reports aren't available through the Smoothwall User Portal.
Recent and saved reports
You can access all reports generated for a limited time frame: from the last hour, today, yesterday, and older. You can also regenerate previously run reports, change the date range, or change their output format. You can also save generated reports for permanent access.
Sharing
You can invite other members of your organization to view the report generated. This is via a unique shareable link, generated in the user interface. The link is only valid for use for seven days from the point of generating. The shared URL is constructed by using the host name or IP address of the Smoothwall Filter and Firewall that the report is run from, plus the generated report's identification string. For example: http://192.168.0.1/reportviewer?id=Fe6Cqp7JK%2BVUGzdlJGheDQY5oxI. Usage of host name or IP address is dependent on the system identification method selected on the Hostname page. Typically, you identify your Smoothwall Filter and Firewall with an IP address. However, you should not change this from one to the other without good cause because this might cause devices to not connect correctly.
Clearing out saved reports
The default setting when creating a scheduled report is to save the report, which can lead to a large number of saved reports in the Recent and saved page. The page becomes very slow to load and hard to navigate.
Saved reports are automatically deleted after 6 months.
- Saved reports can be deleted one by one.
- If you have a large amount of reports to delete, contact Smoothwall Support.
Custom Reports
After you have selected the data that you want to extract and run your report, you can save your custom report in any folder. The data in custom reports is grouped into sections. You can use existing report templates, including those previously created as custom reports, to create new custom reports. However, if that template is updated whilst being used by other custom reports, the changes don't filter through.
Note: The report sections available for custom reports depend on the modules that you have licensed.
Advanced custom reports
An advanced custom report takes the data from different aspects of the logs. For example, user activity, browsing history, bandwidth used.
When creating an advanced custom report, it's best to imagine the report structure from a group's perspective, that is:
- What data needs to be grouped together?
- Which groups, or data should be repeated?
Grouping sections
You might want to group sections together to allow multiple, logically similar sections to share reporting options. For example, you can group together sections, which you must enter a username for the report to run against. You can also create subgroups within grouped sections. When you group section together, you are presented with extra Grouped options to report on. Sections that have report Options to narrow down the report data, can be used to override the data for the section group that you've setup. For example, for a traffic report showing incoming data only, you can setup one section in a report to disregard all internal traffic.
Reordering sections
You can reorder included sections to create a logical report. If you're using feed-forward reporting, sections that provide feeder data should always be before those sections utilizing the data.
Feed-forward reporting
Feed-forward reporting uses a section’s results as the source of options for subsequent sections. For example, a network interfaces section can be used to gather the configuration details of external network interfaces, whilst another section can use that data to display the bandwidth usage per interface.
Iterative reporting
Iterative reporting is where a section is repeated in the same report, but with a few details changed.
Example scenarios
User activity for each user, by department, during a specific date range. The user activity is broken down into the websites they were looking at, the categories those websites belong to, and the length of time spent browsing. Another scenario is the bandwidth used for configured interfaces, including both incoming and outgoing data. Ignore internal data.