How Plixer Scrutinizer Reports work

Plixer Scrutinizer Reports are designed to augment the various views already available in the user interface by providing a more granular approach to looking up and inspecting statistics related to a network’s myriad functions.

The highly configurable nature of Reports allows users to adapt their output to their specific workflow needs.

Report Types

Before a Report can be viewed or “run”, it must first be created from the **Reports** > **Run Report** page. This process involves selecting both the Exporters to use as data sources and a base Report Type to run.

Plixer Scrutinizer offers over 600 factory-defined Report Types that can be used as starting points for individual Reports. Users are also able to define custom Report Types to support more specialized use cases using the Report Designer tool.

Important

To streamline the process of running Reports, only Report Types that are supported by the metadata Plixer Scrutinizer is able to collect will be made available to the user.

Information elements

When creating a Report, the type selected determines the information that will be summarized. In most cases, the main information elements of a Report will consist of a type of entity or group, such as clients, applications, or IP Groups, and a quantifiable attribute related to their activities.

Note

Certain types of Reports (e.g., conversation pairs) will aggregate data linked to more than one type of entity.

The aggregated data will be plotted in the Report’s activity timeline, in addition to being displayed in table format to serve as the legend for the visualization.

Report scope

The scope of a Report can be adjusted by changing any or all of the following parameters:

  • Time frame - date and time settings that control when the data included in the Report should start and end
  • Filters - allows multiple filters to be applied to limit the number of network objects covered by the Report
  • Traffic direction - can be set to inbound, outbound, or bidirectional to limit the traffic data aggregated by the Report

Hint

These parameters can also be adjusted after the Report has been run once to further refine the output if needed.

Visualization

As part of a Report’s configuration options, users are able to select the type of visualization to apply to the output data.

Depending on the Report Type selected, there may be more or fewer visualization options available.