Using reports

The BMC Defender Reports application group provides general utility in the reporting of both raw and correlated message information. These screens include an Audit reporting facility, graphing tools, an ODBC tool (for viewing data by SQL query) as well as a comprehensive reporting facility based on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Reports can also be distributed to end users through E-Mail.

The Audit facility reports, discussed in this section, are intended to provide summary information to assist with the inspection of completeness. Although these particular reports might have application in forensics, and analytics, this is a secondary function that can be performed by various other interactive tools (such as, the Reports > Query tool, that is tailored for analysts).  Specifically, Audit reports are meant to keep watch on the configuration and data collected by the server at a fairly high-level that is more suited for auditors and managers as opposed to security officers and IT administrators.

This section provides additional application notes that might be of interest, including methods of configuring reports, distributing these reports, and using these reports as part of the standard operations for an enterprise.

PDF reports

In an out-of-the-box configuration, BMC Defender Server supports HTML, Text, and CSV reports. The operator can download these reports using hyperlinks found on the report viewer screen (after drilling down into a report).

In particular, the HTML report provides a listing similar to the report viewer (except without hyperlinks or any images) and furnishes some simple JavaScript controls to search and sort the report data. The HTML reports can be viewed by any modern browser on any machine, hence are quite transportable.

For those sites that want to use PDF, BMC Defender provides a simple but effective PDF generator that can be added to the system to create a Download PDF link. This adapter does not come with the program (for export control reasons) but is available on request and at no charge.

Note

These PDF files, while transportable to other systems, do not permit easy sorting of columns as do the HTML reports; hence these reports are included mainly for completeness or to assist with organizational standards for documentation.

This section provides information about the following topics:

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