I am also very interested in showing my customers reports on their usage. It
seems I cannot find any good info or tutorials on line, and am not proficient
enough yet to make it from scratch myself (without guidance).

If anyone can help, please let me know too!

You can make a management aka debug connection to the server (by supplying the
login + password you use to access the FMS console) and then read using the
built-in management-commands all information that's available at that time.

To store periodic data (e.g. samples every 5 minutes) you have to create an
SWF that will connect to the server and will retrieve the data you want. Then
use a simple sendAndLoad method to supply the data to some script on some
webserver and let the script store the data in a database for later analysis.

You can find many examples in the management-docs (pdf) in the documentation
directory of your FMS-installation.

I suppose the best way to do it depends on the structure of your application
and what data you need to collect. Data about connected clients and streams can
be obtained through your application, but if you want to track data transfer,
bandwidth usage, license usage, etc.... you'll need to make a connection to the
admin service.

You can use a .swf to retrieve the data as FMS-Developer mentioned, but you
can also have that happen on the server side. You can build an FMS app that
will run with no connected clients, and report server stats back to your
remoting service, XML socket server, or to any app server that accepts http
post/get requests. If you don't use an .swf, you just need to design the app so
it doesn't shut down when the server does garbage collection (return false in
your onAppStop handler), and you'd need to start it through the admin console.

Since most of the http side backend I do is PHP I prefer to use AMFPHP for
things like this, but there are a world of otheroptions. If you provide some
detail about the data you need to collect and how you need to collect it, and
about your server/application server/web service model, maybe we can come up
with ideas about the best option.