Aliases

Aliases enable you to define an alternative name for a data item or group of data items, which you can choose to display when viewing your data in Summaries or Reports.

Aliases can be used to translate names or IP addresses into a more useful form. This means that a user's or web site's name can be viewed instead of its IP address, or a type of file rather than the file extension.

Aliases example: 'Bob Smith' will be displayed instead of '192.168.0.213', or 'image file' instead of '.gif'.

T here are two types of aliases:

String Aliases:
String Aliases can convert any Summary item into a meaningful display name as long as the summary item exactly matches an item in an alias group.

IP or Subnet Aliases:
IP or Subnet Aliases can only be applied to Summary items that are IP addresses. An IP or Subnet alias can contain subnet expressions as alias items, such as 192.168.0.0\24. Using binary arithmetic, an IP or Subnet alias evaluates whether an IP address belongs to any of its configured subnets and alias the IP addresses appropriately

Vantage Ultimate comes with a list of aliases that you can use for common reporting requirements, including:

Usernames The Usernames alias enables you to group users by real user names when viewing the any 'User' type summary, such as Source Addresses, Host Names, and Usernames

Departments The Departments alias enables you to group any item in a 'User' type summary or any item defined in your Usernames alias by 'Departments'.

Files The Files alias enables you to group file extensions by a descriptive file name, when viewing any 'Extensions' summary.

Websites The Websites alias enables you to group URLs by site names when viewing summaries created from URLs in your log file (see Summaries created from URLs).

Productivity The Productivity alias enables you to group Profiles by productive and unproductive browsing when viewing the Profiles summary.

Months The Months alias enables you to represent the numbers 1 through 12 with names such as January, February and so on.

Subnets The subnets alias enables you to group IP addresses into your organization's Subnets. By default, it groups IP addresses into Internal or External based on common internal IP address ranges.

Some of these aliases, such as Usernames and Departments, need to be configured to suit your organization. You can import this information from your network's domain controller (see Importing Usernames from your network).

You can also create your own aliases for your custom reporting requirements.

To apply an alias to your data in Summaries, simply select the alias from the drop down list at the top of the screen.