SmartEvent R80.x report generation failure

[Danny]

For more than a year now I'm experiencing issues when trying to generate SmartEvent reports for custom time periods. Several service requests didn't solve the issue that existed in R80 and still in R80.10.

The example below shows a Security Checkup Report generation with R80.10 Jumbo Hotfix (Take 56).

As you can see in the screen shot above, pre-defined time periods 'Last 30 Days, Last 7 Days, This Month, etc.' work like a charm. Unluckily there is no pre-defined 'Last Month' time period. Whenever I'm configuring the time period of the previous month manually, the report generation fails. I'm experiencing this issue on all SmartEvent R80.x installations, so this seems to be a more general bug.

Did anyone of you experience the same?

[Danny]

I found a workaround by using Scheduled Tasks. This method offers more pre-defined time periods, such as 'Last Month'. This allowed me to successfully generate reports that couldn't be generated directly from within the report pages.

[Daniel_Moore]

Pre-defined reporting variables are in need of serious improvement. Last month, yesterday and so on are standard reporting features in many enterprise reporting t

Another related issues with reports and timeframe selection is immediately executing the query request, typically resulting in failure of parts or all of a report. This issue was tackled by another vendor who does You have the ability to "live" drill down into data, and the option to set multiple variables BEFORE executing the complete query. Very similar architecture in the current version of Scrutinizer with a Postgres backend, but ONLY a web UI. No fat client with Windows dependancies. ‌ has very similar issues, as did ‌ when always trying to return "live" data while ingesting and correlating. Most of my reporting needs are known, an can easily run when Smart Event is less busy, overnight or on a weekend.

There is a happy medium. None of these issues are trivial engineering tasks (except built in, canned safe REG ex variables). I'm going into month 2 of troubleshooting a Smart Event appliance. Figured now would be a good time to share some of the very real challenges I've seen be fixed in other systems to hopefully save time for others.