Generating a Best Practices Report

This article describes how to generate a Cato Best Practices report that highlights data related to the assessment of policies and settings in your account from the Best Practices page.

Overview of Best Practices Report

Cato provides a Predefined Report template that summarizes the data from the Best Practices page in your account.

Create the template for the Scheduled or One-Time report with data from the status of the Best Practices page at the time the report is generated.

For more about working with Predefined Reports, see Cato Reports.

Creating a Scheduled Best Practices Report

Create a new Scheduled report, and define the Filters for the items included in the report. Then define the Report Schedule which defines how often the report is generated - daily, weekly, or monthly. Generated reports are stored in the Cato Cloud, and they can be automatically emailed or downloaded.

You can select the Mailing List of email addresses for the recipients, the list can include Cato Management Application admins and external users.

For more information about Mailing Lists, see Working with Mailing Lists.

To create a scheduled Best Practices report:

From the navigation pane, select Home > Reports.
From the Predefined Reports tab, click New > Scheduled report. The Scheduled Report panel opens.
Enter the Report Name for the Predefined Report.
In Type, select Best Practices.
(Optional) In Filters, filter the report by status (passed or failed).
In Report Schedule, configure these settings:
1. Select the Frequency that the report is automatically sent: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.
2. For Weekly and Monthly Scheduled reports, in Every select the day that the report is sent.
In Subscriptions, select the Mailing List that receives the report.

You can click New to create a new mailing list.
Click Save. The report template is added to the Predefined Reports tab.

Manually Generating a Scheduled Report

A new Scheduled report is generated based on the Report Schedule settings. For example, a weekly report configured for Monday, is generated every Monday. You can also choose to manually generate a Predefined Report, and the generated report uses the same time range based on the current day. If an admin manually generates a weekly report on a Tuesday, the time range for the report is the previous 7 days starting from that Tuesday, regardless of the starting day of the Scheduled report.

To manually generate a Scheduled report:

From the navigation pane, select Home > Reports.
From the Predefined Reports tab, find the Scheduled report and click Generate.
From the Generated Reports tab, find the report and click Download.

Creating a One-Time Best Practices Report

Create a new One-time report template, and define the Filters for the items included in the report.

To create a One-Time Best Practices report:

From the navigation pane, select Home > Reports.
From the Predefined Reports tab, click New > One-time report. The One-time report panel opens.
Enter the Report Name for the Predefined Report.
In Type, select Best Practices.
(Optional) In Filters, filter the report by status (passed or failed).
Click Save. The report template is added to the Predefined Reports tab.

You can also click Save & Generate, and then the report is generated and you can download it from the Generated Reports tab.

Understanding the Best Practices Report

These are the sections in the Best Practices report:

Best Practices Overview: Displays the Cato Score, the percentage of passed and failed checks, and the last time the Best Practices was updated for this report.
Best Practice Categories: Each category has a table with the Best Practices information for all checks performed on that category. For example, Internet Firewall and Threat Prevention each have their own tables with the full details of their Best Practices checks.