The internet is slow — and everyone blames everyone. Untangle's free Reports app ends the guessing: which machine, which application, at what time. Here is how to read it properly and use it fairly.
Of every app in the rack, Reports is the one small offices end up opening daily — and it is free. But raw reports confuse beginners: addresses instead of names, totals without causes. This page shows the who, what, when method that turns reports into answers, plus the small naming discipline that makes them readable forever.
Reports is a free app, but it only knows what it has seen. Switch it on during setup, confirm it is recording sessions, and then resist judging anything for the first full week — a firewall installed on Monday has no idea what a normal Friday looks like. Reports builds daily summaries of traffic by host, by application and by website category, and can email digests on a schedule. That history is the real product: the day someone says "the internet is slow", you open last Tuesday's report instead of starting an argument.
Bandwidth problems have three shapes, and reports separates them. Who: the top-hosts view shows which machine moved the data — often it is a server doing backups or updates, not a person at all. What: the application view shows whether it was video streaming, cloud backup, Windows updates or something unknown on an odd port. When: the hourly pattern shows whether the flood runs all day or only at 11 am when one cloud backup job fires. Nine times out of ten the fix is scheduling or one misconfigured machine — not a bigger internet plan and not a staff lecture.
Reports identifies machines by IP and MAC address unless you help it. The office discipline that makes reports genuinely useful: give fixed addresses (or DHCP reservations) to servers, printers and known PCs, keep a simple list of which address belongs to whom, and where you have user logins, connect them with the directory or captive portal features. "192.168.1.47 used 40 GB" starts an investigation; "ACCOUNTS-PC used 40 GB on updates" ends one. Ten minutes of naming saves hours of guessing every single month.
A closing honesty note. Reports exist to fix network problems and plan capacity — keep them to that purpose. Checking that the link is healthy and a backup job is not eating the morning is administration; building secret dossiers on individual staff crosses a line in most workplaces and in some jurisdictions a legal one. Tell the team the firewall reports on traffic for network management, keep retention sensible, and act on machines and patterns, not curiosity. The video shows the dashboard openly — run your office the same way, in the open, and reports stay a tool nobody resents.
See the dashboard in the video, then run your first bandwidth investigation with this method.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes. Reports is part of the free core and keeps full traffic summaries by host, application and category. It is one of the strongest reasons to choose this platform for a small office that has never had visibility before.
Very normal. Servers move backups, updates and sync traffic, often in bulk and often at badly chosen times. Check the application and hourly views — usually the fix is rescheduling the job to off-hours, not restricting anyone.
Retention depends on your settings and disk space, since logs live on the firewall box itself. Set retention deliberately during setup, keep the box on an SSD, and export or email the digests you may need for longer-term records.