FTP Support

Required Subscription: Core Subscription

Required Permission Level: Restricted User

Within Brightmetrics you can create reports and have them emailed on a schedule, in CSV format, where you can then import that into a separate database of your choosing. This is commonly used when organizations want to leverage the same filters and parameters defined by business users in Brightmetrics to provide the data to be consumed by the organization's broader business intelligence platform or services with other operational, sales, and business KPIs.

Entering FTP Information:

In the recipients' list for a scheduled report, you can enter an FTP/FTPS/HTTP/HTTPS URL just as you would an email address. For example:

ftp://username:password@host/path/to/folder/

Or for anonymous FTP

ftp://host/path/to/folder/

A few things to note:

• The report is generated and sent from our system, not from the agent, so the FTP host must be publicly accessible.

• Special characters in the password may need to be escaped with percent-encoding so they do not appear to be part of the URL.  In particular, colon (:), at-sign (@), percent (%), question mark (?), semicolon (;) and space will need to be escaped.  For instance, instead of ftp://username:p@ssword@host/path/, it should be entered as ftp://username:p%40ssword@host/path/.  A web search for "url encoder" will provide a number of utilities for URL encoding, if needed.

• You can use an ftps:// URL to have our system use FTP over SSL.  Consistent with RFC 4217, the FTP connection takes place over the standard TCP port 21 and negotiates TLS after connecting (aka "explicit TLS").  An earlier deprecated standard known as "implicit TLS" using TCP port 990 is not supported.

• You can also use an sftp:// URL to have our system use the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).  You can use username/password authentication, although note that this may have to be explicitly enabled in your SSH server as sometimes only keyboard-interactive authentication is enabled, which is different from stored-password authentication.  Alternatively, public key authentication can be used by adding the following public key to the authorized keys for the user specified in the URL.  No password need be present in the URL in this case.  Username, however, is always required, since the SSH server needs to identify the user account.

  ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDRbMH526vIJMWkF8hOz1NRsjI2Efv3nN2TFMfvWJO18qK7TDi6Naw6hbs5OW4ES62pDkM0Sbm82Hdtjgg2CJPoGL64Qp9/TylguBJ4X3O8q6JCPOMEW5dtpYRYj7PpKUBpYfmaP2qfrXrCiQ+8FK8a2tQMVzPbNELThYXk8LMhGE8Ns/7YzqDDYb/w2v8XQlKNCUlQjxvqzZenrTE9vQ9NQMrTWpdhKif9mZU2vhRpA6T4nJuHeBtf8TZ2gVGDHhBxMDNhg3l9FwC3oMoHqUYcUsiNcC+0wmHyJ2bw5YV7cdKpQ9g7fMDbnBy8E50V2LxF5CxM2JkTwmP78eoMnhwt reporting@brightmetrics

• You must enter the path to the folder where the file should be stored. It need not end with the trailing slash, that will be added automatically if not provided. The file name will be the same as when it is emailed as an attachment: the default or a custom subject, optionally with the time and date appended, and with the type-appropriate file extension.

• If you enter an HTTP URL, it will be sent as an HTTP PUT request. It is intended for sending the report (usually you would send it in CSV format) directly to a web service for further processing.

Questions or feedback? Please email us at support@brightmetrics.com.