Through a Legacy Agent or AgentFS, Micro Focus File Reporter takes a file system “scan” of the file system’s storage resource at a given moment. A storage resource can be a Micro Focus network server volume or Microsoft network share.
File system scans are indexed data that are specific to a storage resource. They are the means of generating a storage report or analytics views. Scans include comprehensive information on the file types users are storing, when files were created, when they were last modified, permission data on the folders where these files reside, and much more.
File Reporter collects file system scans from the Agents, compresses them, and sends them to the Engine, where the Scan Processor takes them and uploads them to the database.
File system scans can be taken at any time, but we recommend using a scheduled time after normal business hours to minimize the effect on network performance.
You should consider a number of factors as you decide how often to conduct a file system scan:
Although daily scanning always provides the most up-to-date information, scanning is not throttled and might place a considerable load on the server hosting the Agent.
Most storage resources do not change rapidly enough to justify daily scanning.
Monthly scanning places the least total load on individual servers and on the network, but scans are not as up-to-date as they could be.
You can scan frequently-changing volumes more often and scan the more static volumes less often.
Part of the decision concerning scanning frequency involves the primary purpose of the reporting. Reporting on storage trending can generally use less frequent scans, but reporting that is intended to solve immediate problems, such as “Who filled up this volume?” needs more frequent scans.
When information is needed immediately, you can manually trigger a scan.
For installations where you are not sure of the optimal scanning frequency, you can start with weekly scanning, and then adjust that interval based on the needs of the particular site.
By default, File Reporter only retains the most current file system scan and permissions scan of a storage resource. However, if you want to generate Historic Comparison reports, which let you compare two scans of the same storage resource over two points in time, you will need to specify that scans be retained. Depending on the retained scan type, this is done either manually or automatically.
You can specify that a file system or permissions scan be retained indefinitely as a “Baseline scan” by manually specifying it in the Scan Data page. For procedures and more information on Baseline scans, see Section 5.5, Establishing a Baseline Scan.
Within the scan policy, you can specify that the last file system scan or permissions scan be retained when a new file system scan or permissions scan is conducted. This version is known as a “Previous scan.” For procedures and more information on Previous scans, see Section 5.4, Creating Scan Policies.