Reports

Reports are used to analyze historic monitoring results over a specified time such as one or more days, one month, or one year.

PRTG includes a powerful reporting engine for ad-hoc, as well as scheduled report generation in PDF format. Reports can be run on-demand or can be run on a regular basis (e.g. once a day). A report can be created for one or more sensors. The content and layout of the report is controlled by the report template of your choice and is the same for all sensors in a report.

Here is a sample report page for one sensor: You can see two graphs (one for the current month and one for the sensors history over the last 365 days) plus a data table with the numerical results:

Creating reports involves 3 steps:

Step 1: Setting up a Report

Select choose "Reports | Add Report" from the main menu to get started:

Click on "Save" when your are done with the settings. Please see "Editing Report Settings" further down for more detailed information.

Step 2: Select Sensors Manually

In the "Select Manuals Manually" tab, you can then edit the list of probes, groups, devices, sensors and channels which are included in the report. Adding a probe, group or device will include all associated sensors (and their channels), too.

You can enable/disable individual channels of a sensor using the checkboxes. Use the "Delete" links in the "Actions" column to remove an object from the report. To add more objects to a report choose one from the list of all objects in the lower half and click the "Add" link. To find a specific object either use the paging function of the table or enter a search term in the search box and click "Search". All changes to the sensor list are saved automatically and immediately.

Step 3: Run the Report

Click on the "Run Now" tab to create a report immediately:

Select the desired settings and click on "Run Report".

• HTML Reports will be shown immediately.
• PDF reports will be created in the background and you will receive an email with a ToDo when the report is finished.

In the Report Settings, you can also set an automatic schedule to run the report on a regular basis.

Step 4: Accessing Historic Reports

On the "Stored Reports" tab you can access former reports that are stored on the disk.

Editing Report Settings

In the "Settings" tab, you can configure the following settings for the current report:

• Report Name: Please choose a descriptive name.
• Template: You can choose from the list of available templates. There are templates that offer graphs, data tables, or both and there are "Top x" reports. You also specify the graph/calculation intervals by selecting a template. Note: In this PRTG version, we do not officially support customizing report templates. However, you can edit the template *.htm files in the "website\reporttemplates" subfolder of your PRTG Installation.
  
• Timezone/Paper size/Orientation: Please select the appropriate settings for your needs.
• Add Sensors Manually: If you want to add or remove sensors for this report manually, please use the "Select Sensors Manually" tab. You will find the according options there. See "Step 2: Select Sensors Manually" above.
• Add Sensors by Tag: Enter one or more tags. Every sensor from the sensor tree which has one of the tags will then be added to the report. Note: The concept of inheritance also works with tags (see section Inheritance of Settings).
• Filter Sensors by Tag: Use this field to further filter all sensors added to this report (either manually or by the "Add Sensors by Tag" option). Enter one or more tags and only sensors with one of these tags will be visible in the report. Works best if used in combination with a manual selection of probes, groups or devices.
• Report Schedule: You can choose between no schedule and several different schedules. This report will be run automatically on the scheduled dates. According to your settings, you will be asked to additionally specify an hour, a day, or date. If you choose automatic processing you will receive a new message in your "ToDos" every time the report is run.
• Scheduled Processing: Select what should be done when an automatic report is run. Options are: Save report to disk, email it, or both.
• Reported Period/Report Period Type/... Period: Please select if you want a report with data of the current or previous day, week, month or year. According to your settings, you will be asked to select a day, week, month or year period, too.
• Report only for specific hours-of-day (Schedule): You can select a schedule to narrow the monitor data for the report. Only sensor data monitored during the specified time will be used then. Please note: The items in the drop down selection are inserted by the central Schedules engine. To change these settings or to add a new schedule, please select "Setup | Schedules" from main menu (see section Schedules for more details).
• Show Percentile: For some report templates, you can activate a percentile calculation here for each sensor channel. See section Calculating Percentiles for more details.
• Report Comments: You can enter a customized introduction and footer comments which will be added at the beginning and the end of your report.
• Access Rights: For each User Group, you can specify access rights for this report. Options are "None", "Read", "Write" and "Full".

Remarks

To get a quick and easy report of one single sensor, its best to use the "Historic Data" report function. See section "Reviewing Historic Data" in Web Interface.

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