Why don't my SonicWall GMS reports have any data?

As part of our SonicWall GMS Gold program we send out reports for each firewall either weekly or monthly.    From time to time, partners notice that there is data missing from the report and figure there is some setting on our side that fixes it.   Most of the time this happens with the initial report, since most of these are configuration errors.

The reality is that GMS simply accepts Syslog entries from the firewall and processes them.  The primary reason that reports are missing data, is simply the data is NOT being sent to GMS.

Here are 3 reasons the SonicWall firewall may not be sending Syslog data for a category:

  1.  There is no data.  For example Anti-Spyware may be licensed and enabled but if no spyware was detected during the time frame of the report there is no data to report and the category will be blank.
  1. The service is licensed but not enabled, or is enabled but misconfigured.
  1. The installed firmware has a bug affecting the reporting for that category. Always make sure you are running the latest General Release firmware version for your firewall.

GMS Report blank category error messages explained:

If there is no data for a given category the report will show one of these messages:

  • The firewall is registered in the GMS MySonicwall account and the service is licensed:
    • No Matching Records Found
  • The firewall is registered in the GMS MySonicwall account and the service was licensed but has since expired:
    • No Matching Records Found
    • The license for this report category has expired.
    • Please check Register/Upgrades > Service Licenses for more information
  •  The firewall is registered in the GMS MySonicwall account and the service is not licensed:
    • No Matching Records Found
    • The appliance is not licensed for this service.
    • Please check Register/Upgrades > Service Licenses for more information.
  •  The firewall is not registered in the GMS MySonicwall account. The service may or may not be licensed.
    • No Matching Records Found
    • GMS cannot determine the subscription status as the appliance may be registered to a MySonicwall account that is different from the one used to register GMS.

NOTE:  Although reporting data will be complete regardless of where the firewall is registered, there are some disadvantages to not having your device registered in the GMS MySonicwall account.   Check out this blog post for reasons why you should register your firewall through GMS’ MySonicWall.

I hope this helps explain why some of your SonicWall GMS report data might be missing.   If you have any other suggestion, please leave a message in the comments below.