Generating Reports

(Pro Version)

Home > Advanced Features > Generating Reports

The MaaTec Network Analyzer can generate network traffic reports. You can customize the report schedule, contents, target directory, and the format of the reports. To start a new report generator, click the New Report button ,open the File menu and choose the New Report command or press Ctrl+R on the keyboard. This will open the Settings dialog for reports.

To get to know the different report options, go to the Save and Load Filter Settings page of the Settings dialog and click the Import button. In the file dialog navigate to the MTNA installation directory and open the ReportDemo.mnset file. This file contains some report settings that will demonstrate many of the report features of the Network Analyzer.

Now open the Report Settings page. You can change the schedule and file properties for reports here. First choose a directory, where the reports shall be stored. For testing you should set the report frequency and duration to 'every 1 minute for 1 minute'. Otherwise you may need to wait awhile before a report is generated. Check the HTML format box and enable all detail options.

Go to the Report Data page.

On top of the page you find a row of buttons. Each of these buttons represents a data table that can be included in the generated report. If a table is included in a report, it is marked with a green LED on the button. To edit the properties of a data table, click the corresponding button. This will fill the dialog elements with the currently configured content of this table. To include a table in a report, you need to check the Enable box to the right of the button row. To exclude a table, uncheck the box. This will turn the button LED red. As a report needs to contain at least one data table, the first table will always be enabled.

Below the table buttons you can choose a statistics module that shall be used for the current table (see also Network Statistics). The values and column lists allow to select specific columns (and their units) that shall be included in the final table. You can specify a column here that shall be used for sorting and you can select different charts that will be added below the data table in the report.

If you imported the ReportDemo settings file, click some of the table buttons and take a look at the different settings. Then click the OK button and continue with the next but one paragraph.

If you want to configure the report settings yourself click the table 1 button. Then select the 'LAN Traffic per System' module (or 'L2 Address Statistics' if you switched off the Easy Statistics Mode) in group B). The list on the left now contains all available values (columns) for this module, the column list on the right contains the values that will be actually contained in the report. To add values to the report, select one or more in the Values list and click the Add button or double-click any value entry. To remove values from the report, select them in the columns list and click the remove button. Now add 'Address (User)', 'Address (Raw)', 'Total Packets', and 'Total Bytes' to the columns list. Click the small arrow button in the sort column of 'Total Bytes' and select 'descending'. This means that the report will contain the MAC addresses of all systems that caused any traffic on the network while the data for the report was collected. The list will be sorted according to the number of bytes these systems have sent and received and  the system that caused the most traffic will be displayed on top of the list.

After clicking OK in the Settings dialog, the Report View will open and display information about scheduled, running, and failed reports. You can change the above settings later. Therefore open the Settings dialog again via the Collect > Capture Settings menu command. Changes to the schedule will take effect when the next report is scheduled, changes to the data content will be used by the next report that is started.

Note: If you get the message that the report file could not be opened, you have probably used characters in the report file prefix that are not valid for filenames, or you don't have write permission for the target directory. You need to close the report view and create a new one, because currently a restart of a failed report generator is not possible.

Wait until the first report has been created (or close the report view after a scheduled report was started) and open it with your browser. The report will contain as many data tables as you enabled on the Report Data page. Each table may be followed by one or more charts.

If you generated a text report, open it with any text editor. The header and time information can be switched off on the Report Settings page of the Settings dialog; thus it may be easier to parse the report data with other applications. The collected data is added to the text report as a tab-separated list. This may look a bit confusing in the text editor. But you can copy the data into or open this file with your favorite spreadsheet editor as well. This will in most cases format the data in a more convenient way. Alternatively you may increase the tab width of your editor.