The free Reports app is the reason this gateway earns its place: who uses the bandwidth, which sites get visited, and what got blocked — in plain pages.
Every other page in this set ends with 'check Reports', so this page explains what Reports actually is. It is a free, built-in app that keeps a database of what crosses the gateway and turns it into readable pages: top websites, top users by bandwidth, blocked attempts, VPN activity, per-app detail for everything in the rack. Reports is also the app that changes office politics — most filtering arguments end when the actual usage is on the screen.
Open Reports and resist the graphs for one minute. The four questions that matter in any week: Who used the most bandwidth? What categories and sites dominate? What was blocked, and was any of it legitimate work? When are the peaks? NG Firewall reports are organised per app — the Web Monitor and Web Filter reports show web behaviour, the Bandwidth reports show volume and top talkers, the Intrusion Prevention report shows stopped attacks. One honest note: reports can only describe traffic that crossed the gateway; a phone on mobile data is invisible, and no report makes it visible.
Every blocked item names the app that blocked it and the reason — a category, a rule, a reputation score. Before reporting 'the firewall blocked the bank' upward, open that entry: it is regularly a different, correct block (a look-alike phishing domain, an expired certificate) wearing the bank's name in the user's retelling. Reports turn 'the internet is broken' into a specific, checkable row in a table — that is their daily value to an admin.
Reports can be generated on a schedule and emailed — a weekly summary to the owner or IT lead is the standard pattern, sized for reading, not for archiving unread. Event alerts exist for the moments that should not wait for Monday: attacks detected, WAN failures, services stopping. Set alerts narrowly. An alert that fires forty times a week is not an alert; it is training to ignore alerts.
Two limits to state plainly. Retention is bounded by disk: Reports keeps history while storage allows and prunes the oldest data first, so a small disk means a short memory — size storage with the retention you actually want. Privacy: a gateway sees metadata about everything — sites visited, volumes, times — and on a company network that visibility should be announced in the acceptable-use policy, kept to admins, and used for security and capacity, not for casual curiosity about individuals. The tool is legitimate; how an office wields it decides whether staff trust it.
See the reports the gateway produces once it is configured, in the full install and configuration walkthrough.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes. Reports is part of the free core of NG Firewall, along with the Firewall, Intrusion Prevention, Phish Blocker, Ad Blocker, Captive Portal and OpenVPN apps. Some of the data it reports on comes from paid apps — you only see Web Filter detail if Web Filter runs — but the reporting engine itself needs no subscription.
As far back as your stored data reaches, which depends on disk size and how busy the network is. Busy networks on small disks may keep days to weeks; quiet networks on generous disks keep far longer. If you need a guaranteed history for compliance, plan storage and scheduled report emails deliberately instead of assuming the database keeps everything.
Yes — that is what the Arista ETM Dashboard is for. Registered appliances report into the central dashboard, where status, alerts and summaries across sites can be reviewed together instead of logging in to each box. Single-box admins can live happily in the local Reports app; multi-branch admins end up in the dashboard.