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Ask Slashdot: Is Reporting Still Relevant?
New submitter MrWHO (68268) writes A while ago we switched for monitoring our systems to the ELK (ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana) stack. Our management wanted to keep the reports they got — and possibly never read — flowing in at the beginning of every week with statistics like sites traffic, servers downtime, security alerts and the works. As we migrated some of our clients to the same stack they kept all asking for the same thing: reporting.
There was no way for us to create and schedule reports from ElasticSearch — searches for ElasticSearch and Jasper Reports returned nothing apart from people asking how to do it — so we created our own Jasper Reports plugin to create reports from ElasticSearch data, which we released on GitHub a while ago, and we promptly moved along.
None of our clients were easily convinced that a dashboard — Kibana — was a substitute for mail delivered PDFs, even if all the information was there, with custom created panels and selectable date ranges. On the other hand, on the ElasticSearch mailing list when questions were asked about "how do I do reports?" the answer was, and I sum it up here, "Why would you want reports when you have a dashboard?" Are reports still relevant — the PDF, templated, straight in to your mail kind — or the subset of my clients — we operate mainly in Italy — is a skewed sample of what's the actual reality of access to summary data? Are dashboards — management targeted ones — the current accepted solution or — in your experience — reports are still a hot item for management?
None of our clients were easily convinced that a dashboard — Kibana — was a substitute for mail delivered PDFs, even if all the information was there, with custom created panels and selectable date ranges. On the other hand, on the ElasticSearch mailing list when questions were asked about "how do I do reports?" the answer was, and I sum it up here, "Why would you want reports when you have a dashboard?" Are reports still relevant — the PDF, templated, straight in to your mail kind — or the subset of my clients — we operate mainly in Italy — is a skewed sample of what's the actual reality of access to summary data? Are dashboards — management targeted ones — the current accepted solution or — in your experience — reports are still a hot item for management?
Most everywhere I work, reporting is still the top most requirement. Even more so at publically traded companies.
I've had former colleguges make a good living working in the dedicated report-generation area. (Developing reporting tools, creating reports using existing client tools, etc)
But, the use is primarily that of communication, and more so, consistency, of the data generated so that you can see the trends as they happen; and easily share them in email; slides; presentations; and -- more reports to Regulatory agencies.
Dashboards are nice, but they aren't reports.
Reports are normally more complex data manipulation and correlation that are composites and manipulations of the data that dashboards provide.
There are also many one-offs that are needed to be drawn up, for specific documents, endeavours, and studies.
All of which require good reporting tools.
And these reporting tools are lacking in most developers systems.
But, thankfully, many developers can expose all the raw data streams, processed into something usable; to which, they take all these numbers, plug them into a proper reporting / modelling toolset, and generate the reports required using the proper tool.
Many places don't have a proper reporting/analysis tool; and expect the software to deliver that. This is a failure of either knownig the tools exist, or unwillingness to accept the costs involved in the additional licenses. (and thus leading to just importing the data into Excel, and massaging it there)
Application
1. generates Metrics
2. exports Data
3. imported into Reporting Application
4. worked by Analysts
5. automatically Generate Reports as new data is imported.
Steps 1 and 2 often exist. ... which then usually leads them to complain that their applications don't export data in clean, discrete, normalized data sets to which other tools can ingest.
Many places want the Application to do steps 2-5, which is fundamentally not the domain.
And thus led to the development of dashboards and other simple visualizations, which are not proper reports.
Introducing companies to dedicated modelling and reporting tools (Quantrix is one used a lot) tend to get them to realize how much better things could be.
I'm in no way a dashboard hater, but reports are great because:
* I can see them everywhere I can access my email. This is not always the case when a dashboard runs off an internal server.
* Getting an email in the morning is a reminder to check the data. If I have to remember to go to a dashboard I'll forget if I'm busy and could miss something important.
* Reports in my email are easily searchable without fiddling with date ranges in a console - assuming adequate history even exists since the latest time someone thought it would be a great idea to rebuild the dashboard.
Dashboards are great for sharing a realtime view but they aren't a replacement for reports. If you think they are, you probably seriously misunderstand your users.
Dashboards & online reports are great when you have access to them. But what if the dashboard isn't available, or you need to provide the data to someone who doesn't have access to the dashboard?
Open the dashboard in a web browser, take a screenshot, export it to JPEG, and send it as an e-mail attachment.
A screenshot of a report is a poor substitute for an Excel or PDF report where you can copy and paste the data.
While laziness and not wanting to wait 5 extra seconds for number crunching are certainly a factor, I've got customers who are paranoid that we might pull one over on them and retroactively change the data so when they go back to last quarter's numbers they won't be the same.
I set up a cronjob to wget the dashboard weekly, feed it to html2pdf, and email the result to the stakeholders.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
reports will still linger around, strutting proud its cloak of obsolescence.
Reports are not obsolete. As a manager, my "to do" checklist is long enough. Logging in to a dashboard is something that takes time, and more importantly, is something I need to add to my checklist so I remember to do it. A report, on the other hand, is sitting patiently in my email inbox, until I open it with a single click as I process the rest of my email. If you work for me, it is your job to keep me informed. It is not my job to pull information out of you.