About 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.