Introduction to Reports
The Firepower System provides a flexible reporting system that allows you to quickly and easily generate multi-section reports with the event views or dashboards that appear on your Firepower Management Center. You can also design your own custom reports from scratch.
A report is a document file formatted in PDF, HTML, or CSV with the content you want to communicate. A report template specifies the data searches and formats for the report and its sections. The Firepower System includes a powerful report designer that automates the design of report templates. You can replicate the content of any event view table or dashboard graphic displayed in the web interface.
You can build as many report templates as you need. Each report template defines the individual sections in the report and specifies the database search that creates the report’s content, as well as the presentation format (table, chart, detail view, and so on) and the time frame. Your template also specifies document attributes, such as the cover page and table of contents and whether the document pages have headers and footers (available only for reports in PDF format). You can export a report template in a single configuration package file and import it for reuse on another Firepower Management Center.
You can include input parameters in a template to expand its usefulness. Input parameters allow you to produce tailored variations of the same report. When you generate a report with input parameters, the generation process prompts you to enter a value for each input parameter. The values you type constrain the report contents on a one-time basis. For example, you can place an input parameter in the destination IP field of the search that produces an intrusion event report; at report generation time, you can specify a department’s network segment when prompted for the destination IP address. The generated report then contains only information concerning that particular department.