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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?
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.