A lot of the sample reports that come with WebSpy Vantage have a section of the report for Productivity, so what does this mean and how can you customize it?
Productivity in Reports is a grouping of categories or Profiles. Using Aliases each category or profile is defined as either productive or unproductive. WebSpy Vantage includes the Productivity Alias in its sample set of Aliases which come with the software, to get you started.
In the sample Reports that come with Vantage the Productivity Alias is applied to the Site Profile summary, which is WebSpy’s own categorization system. To find out more about what Profiles are and how they can be customized view our blog article: http://www.webspy.com/blogs/index.php/what-are-profiles/
To view the definition of the Productive and Unproductive groups, go to Aliases in Vantage and click on the Productivity alias in the list of aliases. You can now see the Productive Browsing and Unproductive Browsing groups, and the Items (Profiles) currently in each group.
To modify the items in any group, double-click the group name (eg Productive Browsing), then select the item you want to modify and click Edit to edit it, or Delete to remove it from this group. You can also add new items to the group by clicking Add. You will need to ensure the name you enter matches exactly the name of the Profile or category.
You can also add new groups to the alias, for example Uncertain Browsing. To do this click the Add Group link on the left, then give your new group a name, and add items to it.
Any profiles or categories that are not in any of the groups in the alias will show up in the report in the Unknown group.
If your proxy server, firewall or logging device records its own categories in the log file directly, then you can set up the Productivity Alias to use these categories to group into Productive and Unproductive.
To do this:
1. Firstly we will need to ensure that the Alias is applied to the category field from your log files, so in Aliases, double-click the alias name: Productivity
2. From the Schema dropdown select your specific log file schema, for example Forefront TMG Web, or IronPort WSA Access Logs
3. From the field list on the left select the field that contains your categories, then click the right arrow to move the field over to the right-hand list
Now you can add the categories from your logging device into each group as appropriate. If you are not sure what the names of the categories are, go to Summaries and run a new analysis, and select the Analysis Type as ad-hoc. When the analysis completes, click on the summary for your categories to view the full list. You can also export this as a report by clicking Export Current View on the left.
Reporting On Productivity
To modify the report templates to use your new productivity alias with your categories instead of the default WebSpy Profiles you will firstly need to make a copy of the sample template and set the Schema to your specific log file schema, as the base schema does not have access to specific fields from different log files.
For more information on how to do this, check out our blog article, or video tutorial.
Once you have converted the template to your own log file schema, the next step is to modify the template node that reports on Productivity to use your log file’s own categories instead of WebSpy’s Profiles.
To do this:
1. Go to Reports in Vantage and right-click your new template, then choose Edit Template from the pop-up menu
2. Double-click the node in the template that reports on productivity, such as Productivity Assessment
3. On the General page, in the Columns section, double-click the Productivity key value
4. Set the Summary dropdown to the category field from your log files, such as “Categories” for IronPort logs, or “URL Category” for Microsoft FTMG logs; set the Alias dropdown to “Productivity”, then click OK.
You can also use Filters to restrict the report to only include either productive or unproductive browsing, for example.
To specify the filter:
1. In the Reoprt Wizard on the Filters page click Add | Field Value Filter
2. Select the Summary you want to use for the filter – if you are using WebSpy’s Profiles, use Site Profile; or if you are using the categories from your log files, select the appropriate field instead
3. Set the Alias dropdown to Productivity
4. Select the Include radio button
5. Check the checkbox(es) for the groups you want to include in the report.
Tips:
1. Whenever you make changes to a report template, on completion of the changes, click Return To Reports on the left, then click the Save Templates link to make a copy of your changes, before running the report.
2. When you run the report, use a test storage, with only a very small amount of data in it. This will allow the report to complete quickly, and let you see whether the changes are what you expected. If they are, then you can run the report on your entire data.
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