Fastvue Reporter with Faster Reports and New Report Types is Now Available!

It's with great pleasure that I am announcing the new version of Fastvue Reporter with faster and updated reports, is now out of beta and publicly available!

Let's get to the point...

It's Much Faster!

I'm sure many of you agree that the biggest issue with Fastvue Reporter has been the time it takes to generate reports. Depending on the amount of data you're reporting on, a report could take a few seconds, a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a few days in extreme cases.

This has been our focus for over a year. We've completely rearchitected the storage and data analysis engine leveraging a technology called Elasticsearch, and we're happy to announce that our reports are now much faster than before, helping to reduce IT workload and get a handle on your network usage.

Exactly how much faster can vary depending on the report type and the size / structure of your data, but to give you an idea, here is a side-by-side comparison running exactly the same report on exactly the same data set, on exactly the same hardware, using both the old and new versions of Fastvue Reporter.

We've also introduced a couple of report features that we think you'll enjoy.

Purpose Built Reports

Another commonly reported issue was that Overview Reports contained too much information. HR and Department Managers are not interested in seeing information about firewall rules and connections, and IT staff do not necessarily need to see information on staff productivity.

So we've separated our Overview Reports into three sub-reports - Internet Usage, IT Network and Security and All Usage.

Internet Usage Report

Department Managers, Teachers, HR etc are only interested in viewing the important information about people's internet usage. Now you can easily schedule the Internet Usage Report to run every day, week or month, and this will contain only the Internet Usage information they need know, such as the Top Users, Safegarding information (see below), Top Sites, the most Unproductive Users and Sites and so on.

IT and Network Security Report

People in the IT Team can still find potential network threats, or the Policies and Rules responsible for blocking or allowing traffic, and other information such as Top Connections to help troubleshoot their network, simply by selecting the IT Network and Security Report.

All Usage Report

Need all the things? You can still generate a single report showing Internet Usage as well as IT, Network Security information using the All Usage Report.

These three sub-reports are available whether you are running an Overview Report on your entire organisation, or a User Overview Report to investigate a single user. The Filters interface is still available so you can narrow down these reports to specific departments, networks, categories or anything else in your firewall's logs.

Activity Reports are still available so you can view browsing sessions with start and end times, with full URLs and timestamps available at a click, and you can hover any value in the reports to run a new Internet Usage Report, IT and Network Security Report, All Usage or an Activity Report on that value.

New Safeguarding Reports

Many customers have been using Fastvue Reporter to help them safeguard students and employees at risk of self-harm, extremism and violence and inappropriate online content.

To make accessing this type of information even easier, we've added a Safeguarding section to the Internet Usage reports that highlights suspicious searches, all searches, as well as both blocked and allowed unacceptable content.

YouTube Videos and Searches

We've previously published some articles on how to extract a list of YouTube videos that people have been watching by applying a filter to Activity Reports. This has become such a common use case that we've decided to add a widget for showing YouTube video URLs and YouTube Searches directly into the new Safeguarding section in the Internet Usage Report.

YouTube Video URLs

YouTube Searches

Get it now!

Internally, we call this release the 'Fastvue Reporter 4.0' platform as it's the fourth iteration of our Fastvue Reporter platform from which all Fastvue Reporter applications are built. Individual product versions built from this platform are:

So please, go ahead and download the latest version of Fastvue Reporter for your firewall. If you're upgrading your existing installation be sure to view the upgrade guide as there are some important facts you need to know, such as the data migration process, and the storage requirements being larger than the previous version.

Thank You!

I'd like to finish by saying that we still feel like we're at the beginning of the journey. The introduction of Elasticsearch as our backend data layer has introduced some exciting possibilities for our future applications. Thanks to the amazing feedback from our customers and partners, the Fastvue team is beaming with many great ideas that we can't wait to get to work on!

Speaking of which, we need help! If you're interested in being part of Fastvue's mission of making Internet usage reporting simple and less creepy, we're looking for designers, developers, marketers, devops writers and content creators. We're a fully remote team and value work-life balance. Please get in touch!