Day 14: IT Monitoring Reports

30 Days of FrameFlow

Time to Read: 5 Minutes

Getting Started with Reports

With FrameFlow, you can create custom reports that summarize the daily functions of your various event monitors and network devices. Every FrameFlow installation comes with five default report types: CPU usage, memory, disk usage, ping response time, and bandwidth. Today, we'll explore these and other reports in more depth.

Monitoring Reports

In the folder "Monitoring Reports" are some report templates you can use to learn more about your critical systems. As we mentioned on day seven when we covered the System Health Event Monitor, there are report templates for all five system health metrics. Let's build a memory usage report to get familiarized with the layout of the Reports section.

Creating a Monitoring Report

Begin by navigating to FrameFlow's Reports section. Choose the Memory Usage Report template. The information you initially see when you choose the report is sample data. To build the report with data from your monitors, use the blue Actions menu to select "Build Report Now". Your report may take a few moments to load.

As you can see, the Memory Usage report type contains a breakdown of minimum, maximum, and average memory usage in percentage for each network device in your configuration. You also get one graph per device that conveys average memory usage per hour. Using the Actions menu, you can easily export any report as a PDF.

Please take the time to explore our other monitoring reports on other system health metrics. These reports can save you time summarizing a wealth of information from your most critical network devices, all in one place.

Inventory Reports

The other folder of default report templates covers inventory monitoring. To create informational inventory reports about your network devices, you'll need to create inventory event monitors first. FrameFlow offers three different types of inventory event monitors: the Windows Inventory Event Monitor, Linux Inventory Event Monitor, and the SNMP Inventory Event Monitor.

Creating an Inventory Report

In our example, we'll create a Windows Inventory Event Monitor, but the setup steps for all three inventory monitors are the same. Feel free to follow along with the inventory monitor that will be most helpful to you.

To begin, go to FrameFlow's Event Monitors section and right-click to add a new monitor as usual. Search for the Windows Inventory Event Monitor and select it from the list. Assign the network devices you want to create inventory reports about. Inventory event monitors don't have a lot of options inside their settings, but you can choose not to be alerted if the event monitor cannot establish contact. Once you've added the network devices you want to create inventory reports about, you can save and run the event monitor.

Now, navigate to Reports and select the inventory report you want to build. For example purposes, we'll create a Service Inventory Report, which will find and list all services running on the Windows devices we added to the Windows Inventory Event Monitor. When you've found the report template you want to build, use the blue Actions menu to build the report.

As with our monitoring reports, we encourage you to explore the whole list of inventory reports and set up inventory monitors for Linux and SNMP as well.

Custom Reports and Further Reading

As mentioned on Day 7 when we created a System Health Report, you can create custom reports by right-clicking on the tree structure and selecting "New Report". You can even email reports to your IT staff automatically as they're generated! To learn more about custom reports, please read our Reports tutorial.

Day 13: Event History

Day 15: Network Monitoring