BusinessObjects Board

Help with Scheduled Report Administration - Best Practices?

general discussion
#1

I’m starting to run into a small little support nightmare, and I figure all the trusty BoB people must have already come up with a solution, right?

Here’s the issue:
We are starting to advertise BOBJ’s ability to schedule reports. Users love it, knowing they don’t have to go into the system to get thier ‘Monday morning’ reports each week.

IT is currently managing the schedules manually (Eventually we’ll let users schedule thier own sometime in the future). So I know every schedule that gets created.

However… I cannot seem to find a good way to CHECK if there were any failures for a given day’s schedule?

I THINK I can probably use the Activity Universe to create a custom report that looks at scheduled instances etc… but I’ve not looked at it yet… and with the Activity Universe no longer being supported in BOBJ 4, I’d rather not go this route.

Are there any 3rd Party Tools, to be able to easily manage schedules across the server? I’d need to be able to:

  1. See at a glance, any failures that occured for a given timeframe. (At least Daily and Weekly)
  2. See details of each failure (as much as BOBJ gives anyway) so I can research the problem.
  3. Ability to sort by Destination Type, Destination Email etc…

I was thinking of possibly looking into InfoSol for our scheduling but haven’t had a chance to contact them just yet to see what they can or cannot do.

Any others here have similar support requirements for scheduled reports??

JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)

#2

If you’re on XI3, start with the Instance Viewer in the CMC. That should provide what you’re looking for.

And check out the XIr2 scheduling instances viewer in BOB’s Downloads.

Joe

joepeters :us: (BOB member since 2002-08-29)

#3

You can also use events (available in Xi 3.1) to trigger something to happen after a reports fails. This could be a batch script or run another report or some other custom job you come up with.

bension (BOB member since 2005-09-01)

#4

Doh! I have never used Events in the past and forgot they worked both as a “Wait for” and “On Completion”.

If I can run a script, then I’m sure I could have it write a status to a database and then utilize it as I see fit. Thanks.

Now I just need to figure out how to use Events in the first place…

JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)