About Reports

This section discusses types of reports and understanding traffic direction.

Types of Reports

Reports and statistics help you bracket a problem, question, or analysis. The GMS’s collections of reports basically fall into two broad categories:

n	Statistics related to network performance and application performance. These provide visibility into the network, enabling you to investigate problems, and address trends, and evaluate your WAN utilization.

n	Reports related to administration and configuration. For example, list of appliances, software revs, SNMP settings, active users, configuration backups, etc.

Understanding Traffic Direction

Whether you’re troubleshooting or just reviewing reports, know what your frame of reference is.

For any given appliance, statistics and reports reference either of the following:

n	the direction of the traffic [LAN to WAN; WAN to LAN]

•	LAN-to-WAN refers to traffic exiting the LAN, destined for the WAN. This flow is also referred to as outbound traffic.

•	WAN-to-LAN refers to traffic coming from the WAN, destined for the LAN. This flow is also referred to as inbound traffic.

Tip Here’s a helpful mnemonic for remembering the difference:

- Rx is “Receive fRom”, so LAN Rx is “receive from LAN”
- Tx is “Transmit To”, so LAN Tx is “transmit to LAN”

n	the points where an appliance collects data about the traffic [LAN Rx + Tx, LAN Rx, etc.]

For validation and troubleshooting, it always helps to look at both sides of a traffic flow — that is, stats from Appliance A alongside stats from Appliance B. For example:

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