Reports

Purpose

Reports provide a printable summary of the current configuration and of the most recent events in PDF format.

You can use reports, for example, if you require printed documentation of your protective measures, or if you need to present to other people what has recently happened and been configured. Also vWAF can send you daily, weekly or monthly reports by email, which keep you informed at regular time intervals about the most important developments.

Each report covers one specific application. Therefore, if you manage more than one application in vWAF, you need to create a separate report for each one.

Creating and downloading a report manually

To create a report:

In the navigation area, select the application for which you want to create the report.
Activate the Monitoring | Reports tab.
In the section Manual Creation, select whether the report is to cover one Day, one Week, or one Month.
By default, the input field Report ends on displays the current date. This means that the report covers the ongoing day, week or month. If you want to create a report for some time frame in the past, click the calendar symbol next to the input field and choose the date of the last day that’s to be covered by the report.
By default, reports contain an Audit Log relating to the time-frame of the report. If you want a brief report without the Audit Log, clear the add auditlog check box.
Click the Create button to start generation of the report. A new line appears on the list. While the creation of the report is in progress, the Status column displays the text creating report. Depending on the size of the log files this may take some time. When the report is complete, a link with the link text download report appears.
Follow the link to download or open the report.

NOTE
The column Creation Time shows the date and time when the report was created. The report will be available for download until you or another administrator create a new report for the same application and time-frame. You can create a new, updated report at any time by clicking the Create button again.

Scheduling reports sent by email

You can configure vWAF so that it sends reports automatically by email at regular time intervals.

Reports are sent to all users who have read access for monitoring the application. Make sure that valid email addresses have been entered for all users who are to receive reports.

To schedule automatic reports:

In the navigation area, select the application for which you want to create the reports.
Activate the Monitoring | Reports tab.
In the section Scheduled Creation, select the desired time frames:
- daily: A report is created and emailed once a day, at 0:00 a.m.
- weekly: A report is created and emailed once a week, Monday morning at 0:00 a.m.
- monthly: A report is created and emailed once a month, first day of month at 0:00 a.m.
By default, reports contain an Audit Log relating to the time-frame of the report. If you want a brief report without the Audit Log, clear the corresponding add auditlog check box. On the Status Display the message report creation schedule changed appears.

Contents of a report

A report always relates to one specific application. It comprises:

basic configuration parameters:
version of the detection ruleset, version of the protection ruleset, list of application administrators;
in weekly and monthly reports also: complete list of all ruleset definitions
a list of the hosts of the application
a consolidated log file analysis for each host of the application, listing:
- denied requests by IP, denied requests by URI
- requests by handler name, requests by IP
- requests by URI
  (only lists the 10 most frequently affected IPs, URIs, and handlers; for a full analysis, you need to analyze your log files manually (see Log Files)
statistics, relating to the time-frame of the report (see Application Statistics)
optional: an Audit Log, relating to the time-frame of the report (see Audit Log)