We have expanded the Web Reports capabilities in BES 7.0 and we are working on adding all types of reports directly in the system.
There has been a lot of good questions and requests on this forum regarding reporting and we thought it would make sense to involve
all of you in the reports development process. Now is an excellent time to ask for those reports that you always wanted and help us
modify existing reports to be better.
Here is the plan:
Please let us know if you have specific reports that you would like to see in BES. If we can make the report and it seems like it
would be useful to others, we will try to get it added to the system. Feel free to post your request here or you can email us at: betafeedback@bigfix.com
The reports we are creating are mostly backwards compatible with BES 6.0 so we will be posting versions of reports here to the forum that you
can import into your system. If the reports are useful to you now, great! If the reports could use some improvement, let us know and we can
change it before release.
We know that there are lots of requests for new reports and we really want to provide excellent reports in BES 7.0 so hopefully you all can give us some good feedback.
I already posted on the MS Patch status report. If there was a pulldown to filter on group or location it would be absolutely perfect. If we could also filter on the patches to report then it would be unbelievablye.
As it stands itâs a great overview of our implementationâŠ
I would like to see the MS Patch Status Report with some history. For example, I want to see how many clients were relevant on the patch this week vs last week. The âFixlet Historyâ report will do this for a group of patches. I would like to see it summarized in the similar to the MS Patch Status Report.
Basically we want to see which MS patches are being remediated and which are regressing on a weekly basis.
I would also like to see the custom reports work better in FireFox.
I would like to see the MS Patch Status Report with some history. For example, I want to see how many clients were relevant on the patch this week vs last week. The âFixlet Historyâ report will do this for a group of patches. I would like to see it summarized in the similar to the MS Patch Status Report. Basically we want to see which MS patches are being remediated and which are regressing on a weekly basis.
I will look into how we did the Fixlet History reports and see if it can be applied to the MS Patch Report. This seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
The MS Patch Report looks up its information based on fixlets, so it does not have information on the status of actions taken based on those fixlets like the MS Patch Action Status Report does. MS Action Status Report is inherently much slower than MS Patch Report on databases with a large number of actions, however this request comes up often enough that i will look into a clever way of combining them.
I completely agree that web reports should be more compatible with FireFox (which is what i prefer personally). However the activeX controls that we use to make the charts do not work outside of IE. The good new is that we will soon switch over to new snazzy Flex charting, which will work in FireFox.
Itâs not really the charts that bother me, its the javascript errors. Most importantly the EvaluateRelevance function doesnât work.
Another thing i would like to see is some application tracking reports. Specifically it would be nice to see who has something installed and hasnât run it in 3 months. We could then use this information to reclaim the license for that product from that user.
I asked around a bit and the most common feedback is that the report not reflects the console to 100%. We notice that some hidden fixlets are still showing the piecharts and so on. It is also not always up to date. I think many managers would like to view to progress via charts rather then the console but they donât get the full story there.
I would like to select how to view the data and not be bound to a certain type of chart/diagram or list. First I select which data to view and then how to present it.
Smarter chart drilling is also wanted. Like, you have a pie chart that show how many procent of the clients having a critical to install, clicking on that chart could lead to a list showing the relevant clients and so forth.
All list should be equiped (or have the option ) with a search/filter field to make it easier to find a certain device or what it might be.
Iâd like to see better performance. Running a report sometimes can take a looong time. When trying to launch another web session it seem as if the first report session is using up all the resrouces and I canât do much from a 2nd session.
The equivlant of a custom site. We have COs that create reports to share within their departments but must make it public making the report visible for everyone to see. Granted the other NMO do not see the results of the first groups report but it still clusters the public view when every operator does this.
Scheduling a report by the day of the week instead of every XX days. Every monday or 2nd monday would be nice, similiar to the windows tasks scheduler interface.
Easier SSL setup, the last time was painful.
Custom report wizards, examples, documentation. It would be great to write more custom reports but looking a tab with a big blank sheet can be daunting.
Great feedback. I will begin looking into the best ways to address these issues. A few questions I can answer immedately:
Björn,
The BES Console and BES Web Reports share the same mechanism of updating data so if you see discrepencies, please report them to us because they might be a bug we need to fix. Also, the default Web Reports option is to update once every 20 minutes and you can increase that if you want.
Stacy,
I have filed a request to improve the report scheduler.
If you get Adobe Acrobat, it has built in functions to either convert web pages to PDFs or it can âprint to PDFâ. I know that most of our customers use this functionality when they want to ship around reports, so you might consider this option until we find a way to get PDFs created in our product (which has some licensing issues).
You canât do an include and an exclude on the same property. For example when filtering on the installed applications - windows property, i want PCs with Product A installed, without Product B installed. I canât seem to create a filter to do this.
Privately saved filters would be nice. Or even filters that are for only certain groups or sites, similar to Stacyâs #2 above.
More flexibility with ANDs and ORs. I can see all PCs where Property A = X AND Property B = Y, but canât see all PCs where Property A = X OR Property B = Z. The same is true when trying to find all PCs with DNSServer = X AND DNSServer = Y, instead of the default OR.
The filters are limited to exact matches only, I would like to see wild cards, the ability to us > and <, or even the ability to use relevance expressions to filter reports.
Hopefully 7.0 has some enhancements on filtering reports.
Having the ability to report base on a timeframe would be helpful. For example - in the Antipest module there is no ability to report on how many pests were caught today or this week. It is mainly historical over the life of the scans. I would love to have an automated report get sent to my compliance director weekly on systems that fall out of a specific compliance or say how many people âthis weekâ tried to install ânapsterâ. I do know the complexity in having that ability - but in some circumstances (especially AV and Antipest) it would be sooo helpful. Thanks.
Hereâs the session relevance expression to generate that list of Subnet Addresses without an active BES Relay in that Subnet. Could anyone use this to create a simple report?
unordered list of (
if (item 1 of it contains (item 0 of it &
";")) then
""
else item 0 of it ) whose (it !=
"") of (unique values of values of results of bes property
"Subnet Address", concatenation
";" of unique values of values of results whose (exists values whose (it contains
"Yes" or it contains
"Main BES Server" or it contains
"BES Root Server") of result(computer of it, bes property
"BES Relay Service Installed" )) of bes property
"Subnet Address" &
";")
This is exactly what i was looking for, can you also tally the number of clients in each subnet? Also, i substituted Subnet Address for âLocation By Ip Rangeâ and it was more readable for me.
I think this will give the counts for each subnet but I havenât tested it on a large deployment so let us know if the counting is correct.
It also is counting the computer in each subnet so a single computer count be counted multiple times depending on how many subnets its in which donât have BES Relays in it. Its also possible that a computer with a BES Relay in its subnet would still be counted if some of its subnets donât have BES Relays. Maybe we should exclude clients with a âdistance to bes relayâ of zero since that indicates there is already a BES Relay in the subnet.
unordered list of (it &
" (" & multiplicity of it as string &
")") of unique values of (
if (item 1 of it contains (item 0 of it &
";")) then
""
else item 0 of it ) whose (it !=
"") of (values of results of bes property
"Subnet Address", concatenation
";" of unique values of values of results whose (exists values whose (it contains
"Yes" or it contains
"Main BES Server" or it contains
"BES Root Server") of result(computer of it, bes property
"BES Relay Service Installed" )) of bes property
"Subnet Address" &
";")
