Table of Contents
The report menu presents 3 submenus accessible in the column on the left:
Simple report: it is used to create a report directly. It takes you directly to a page where you can enter a description of the report you're about to create, the brand your firewall belongs to and a timerange which may be absolute in time (from date X to date Y) or relative to today (last week, last month, today and yesterdaty and so on).
Scheduled report: shows you a page where all the schedules are listed, one per line. You may select an item from the list (if non empty) by highlighting the line with the mouse and left clicking on it. You may then ask for details of that particular entry by clicking on Details. You may also delete a schedule if you do not want it to be executed anymore by selecting it and clicking on Remove.
Notice that if you remove the schedule from the list (and confirm the operation), the corresponding folder in the schedules subfolder and entry in the OS task scheduler are also removed.
By clicking on new schedule, you have the option to create a new schedule for the report. In this case you would probably specify a relative time since an absolute timerange is unlikely to be usefull for it would create always the same report. In other words, a scheduled report should have timeranges like yesterday or last/current week instead of an absolute time such as from June 1st 2008 to June 30th 2008, for it would create the same report each time which is probably not what you're expecting.
Upon creating a new schedule, you have also the option to set the frequency with which reports are created. You can set a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. If you set a daily schedule, you have to choose at which time of the day report creation is triggered. In case of a weekly schedule, you may choose also on which days of the week to trigger the report creation. Finally with a monthly schedule, you may choose on which days of the month to trigger the report creation.
Once the schedule is confirmed, you're brought back to the former table, where an entry of the latter schedule has been added.
Report archive: shows you a table where all report activities are listed. Each entry in the table shows a report which may be completed and ready to be visualized or still in progress (meaning that the reporter has not yet completed the task). In this case a progress on the right details the current status.
Clearly you can show or remove reports which have been completed, but you have no choice but to wait for completion of the other before visualization or removal is possible (unless you're willing to remove it manually, see below).
As mentioned earlier, it is possible sometimes for the report engine to terminate abruptly without notifying the configurator that the work is no longer in progress. This typically occurs when the reporting engine exhausts all the memory available and even the recovery procedure cannot be carried out properly due to insufficient memory resources, or if the process is killed by the user (for example with the Windows task manager).
In these unfortunate cases, lock folders are left on disk and the configurator believes the work is still in progress while actually it is not and refuses to let you delete the entry in the report table.
You have no choices then but to remove manually the reports from the reports subfolder, by erasing the proper folder report_XXXXXX but you should also delete the index file repindex.txt and reload the page on the browser. The index file will be automatically recreated if not found and will reflect the updated state where the former folder is no longer present.
By analogy, you may wish to delete folders in the schedules subfolder to manually remove report schedules. Mind however that you need also to remove the entry in the operating system task scheduler, otherwise at proper time the OS will try to run a non existing batch file resulting in an error in the event logger.
It is also possible, if the operating system permits it, to alter a schedule using the task scheduler directly and have it executed with frequencies different from the ones the configuration allowed you to set (i.e. the task scheduler allows you a finer regulation of the triggering times, which however is most of the times irrilevant).
Each report folder has a .log and .err file which may be of interest to keep track of what the reporting engine is doing and/or if it stops working why.