Types of Reporting

With Reporter, you can choose from four distinct types of reporting:

•	Ad hoc reporting

Use ad hoc reporting to fulfill a specific need or address an immediate issue, for example, system issues, virus outbreaks, or an auditor requesting specific information. These types of information requests can arise at a moment’s notice. You need to collect, store, and report on your environment at that moment in time and provide those results immediately.

•	Scheduled reporting

Use scheduled reporting when the focus is on your entire environment and requests are for information on a scheduled and ongoing basis. Scheduled collections are a good fit when you know what you want to collect and how often. You can schedule this type of information gathering to occur on a regular basis such as daily, weekly, or monthly outside of normal business hours. You can then run your reports against the stored data.

•	Action-enabled reporting

Use action-enabled reporting when you want to perform specific actions based on report results. Through Reporter’s user interface, you can respond immediately to address security and operational concerns, such as resolving a security breach or making changes to adhere to standards. With this approach, you can maintain tight security controls and minimize operational impact.

•	History reporting

Use history reporting to quickly identify changes that have occurred to your environment. By default, when Reporter collects data it compares it to the data currently stored in the Reporter database. If there are differences, the database information is updated to include the changes. You can report on both the original data and the changes using an option that you set when you schedule your data collection.