Reports
Taranac already records the things worth reporting on: every authentication and authorization decision, every endpoint session, every configuration snapshot, and the audit trail behind all of it. Reporting is what gets that out of the screens and into a document you can hand to someone — an auditor, a manager, a change board.
You never write SQL. Every query ships inside the product, and what you choose is which prepared question to ask and how to show the answer.
Three layers
Section titled “Three layers”Everything in reporting is one of three things, and they stack in one direction.
Templates are the prepared questions. Each one is a fixed query plus a declaration of what you are allowed to change about it — which time windows it offers, which columns can be sorted, how many rows it will return. Templates ship with the release: you cannot create or edit one, and you never have to maintain one. 43 templates are included — see the template catalogue.
Datasets are yours. A dataset is a template plus your choices: the period, the filters, and how the result should look. One template can back any number of datasets — TACACS+ authentication is a template; TACACS+ authentication, last 7 days, as a bar chart of the top ten devices is a dataset you name and keep.
Reports are multi-page documents composed of datasets — one dataset per page, in the order you set, with an optional title page and table of contents. A report is what you export as a branded PDF or put on a schedule.
The rule that keeps this predictable: everything that goes into a report is a dataset. There is no second path, no way to drop a raw template onto a page.
Two kinds of template
Section titled “Two kinds of template”Templates come in two kinds, and the difference is who decides what it looks like.
| Preset | Table | |
|---|---|---|
| The look is decided by | Taranac | you |
| You choose | the period, and which view | the period, chart type, columns, sorting, aggregation |
| Typical shape | a laid-out page — KPI tiles, donuts, trends, rosters | one flat result you shape |
| Exports to | PDF, CSV, XLSX |
A preset is a designed page. We author the layout in code and check it pixel by pixel, so a preset gives you a finished document rather than a chart you have to arrange. Some presets offer more than one view over the same data — AAA overview has a full dashboard and a bare totals row; NAC access overview has an outcome overview and a rejects-forensics view.
A table is open. The query is still ours, but the presentation is yours: show it as a table, or map its columns onto a bar, line, area, pie or donut chart. The template declares each column’s role — dimension or measure — so the chart picker only ever offers mappings that make sense.
“Table” doesn’t mean “only a table”. The same result set becomes a top-N bar or a pie depending on which columns you point at which channel.
Where it lives
Section titled “Where it lives”Reporting has its own section in the sidebar, under Logging & Reports → Reporting, with three screens:
Saved reports, each showing how many datasets it is composed of and the period it covers.
- Reports — saved multi-page documents.
- Datasets — your saved questions, and the template catalogue you create them from.
- Scheduler — recurring email delivery.
What reporting is not
Section titled “What reporting is not”It is not the log export. The AAA and NAC log screens already have their own filtering and export, and they remain the right tool for “show me this one session” or “give me yesterday’s raw authentication rows”. Reporting sits a level up: prepared questions, presented for someone who was not looking over your shoulder.
Permissions
Section titled “Permissions”Reporting is gated by five separate permissions, so you can hand out reading without handing out editing:
| Permission | Allows |
|---|---|
reports:view | see reports, datasets and schedules |
reports:run | render them — previews, quick view, samples |
reports:build | create and edit datasets and reports |
reports:export | download CSV, XLSX and PDF |
reports:schedule | create and manage scheduled delivery |
The common case is an auditor or a manager who gets reports:view and reports:run
and nothing else: they can open and read everything, and cannot change what is being
measured.
A note on safety
Section titled “A note on safety”Because the queries are ours and not yours, reporting can be strict in ways an open query tool cannot be.
Your filter values are passed as bound parameters, never pasted into a query string. Sortable columns are a whitelist that is checked against the query’s actual output when the product starts, so a mismatch is caught in the build rather than in production. And a registry of secret columns can never be projected by any template — private keys, certificate signing requests, session tokens, verification hashes, just-in-time credential plaintext. A reporting engine that can read everything is an exfiltration tool; this one cannot reach those columns at all.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Datasets — building and configuring them
- Reports — composing multi-page documents
- Exports — PDF, CSV and XLSX
- Scheduled delivery — recurring email
- Template catalogue — all 43, by area