File Server Resource Manager Options

The options for FSRM are broken into five areas: e-mail notifications, notification limits, storage reports, report locations, and file screen audits.

E-Mail Notifications

The E-mail Notifications tab configures which SMTP server sends notifications via e-mail. If you configured storage utilization monitoring during installation of FSRM and entered mail server information, the installation information is already entered in the tab. The e-mail address that the emails originate from can be configured (replace with a valid address for your environment).

A Default Administrator Recipients field is set to [Admin E-mail] by default but should be changed to a group containing administrators for the environment. This is used as the recipient for any e-mail where the [Admin E-mail] variable is used as the target, such as for an e-mail about reports or quota/file screening violations.

After you have made your configurations, click the Send Test E-mail button. FSRM sends a test message to confirm the settings are correct.

Notification Limits

The Quota and File Screening components allow various actions to be performed when a violation occurs, such as going over quota or writing an illegal file type. To avoid flooding the user with e-mails or writing excessive event logs in a short amount of time, only one notification of each type per hour for one issue is raised by default. The Notification Limits tab allows you to change these defaults for each of the action types (e-mail, event log, command, and report). For most scenarios, the default of 60 minutes works well.

There can be a temptation to set the time to 0 so every instance of an issue is raised. However, consider trying to write a blocked file type, such as an MP3 file. Windows tries to copy a file once. If it fails, it tries again. If that fails, it tries once more before giving up and throwing an error. This means if you set the notification to 0, all those internal attempts to copy the file generate three exceptions via e-mail, event log, and so on. This is not an attractive situation.

Storage Reports

The Storage Reports tab configures the default parameters for each report type to avoid having to define them each time a report is used. These parameters should be configured to best meet your environment, but they can be changed for specific report executions. This is discussed in the "Reporting" section. For now, remember you can change the defaults for the server.

Report Locations

FSRM has three types of reports:

Incident reports: A report generated as a result of a violation, such as a quota threshold or unauthorized file type
Scheduled reports: A report created based on a scheduled report execution
On-demand reports. A manually triggered report; also known as an interactive report

Each report type has its own save location, which by default is a subfolder of the %systemdrive%\StorageReports folder. The Report Locations tab allows the storage location to be modified.

File Screen Audit

The File Screen Audit tab has just one check box, Record File Screening Activity in Auditing Database. One of the reports in the next section runs a report of all file screening exceptions. This report is not generated by searching for event logs but by an internal database of file screen activity. By default, writing to the internal file screen database is not enabled. If you want to run the File Screen Auditing Report, enable this option, so any file screen exceptions are written to the database for parsing by the report.