Dynatrace Inbuilt Reporting Capabilities/exporting feaures

[echwallah]

Dynatrace should now be thinking of incorporating a powerful built-in Reporting Feature. It's a common requirement for most/all of our clients and the task of using third-party tools to extract metric/performance data and/or exporting to PDF or other formats is quite time-consuming and involving. In my opinion, having an in-built feature would be very useful since the developers are familiar with its internal workflow. This will really improve the acceptance and satisfaction of our clients in the solution. The tool is really powerful but reporting capabilities water down its functionalities when it comes to pitching the product to top management who are essentially the decision makers.

[RomanW]

Hi Erik! With 1.184, we'll ship a capability to "subscribe" to dashboards and receive weekly/monthly email reports of that dashboard. I'd expect this to satisfy our customers core reporting use cases. A "daily" option will come at a later stage.

How much do you think that is going to help us in the situations you described?

Roman

[echwallah]

Hi Roman that will help slightly but still it does not give clients/us power o design the report o r filter or create dimensions aggregating metrics the way e want. We want to be able to design the report in terms of even its appearance and what it can capture. I strongly believe technically this is achievable. Like I mentioned 99% of my clients have asked for a built in feature for this. We always have to use third party tools to achieve that. Dynatrace can just come up with a tab under Reports saying Design your Own

[rmeli]

I agree with Erick. The reporting capability in Dynatrace is completely missing and it has nothing to do with dashboarding.

[RomanW]

Hi Roger! Thanks for chiming in. Can you please elaborate on the reporting capabilities that you'd be looking for?

[rmeli]

Roman,

We just moved from DCRUM to Gen3 and we were shocked at the gaping hole in the reports section. How about for starters building the equivalent of what was in there? I have used many monitoring products in the past and I am not expecting a full blown reporting capability like Cognos as an example but something where we can generate simple reports and send them to users. One example could be JVM heap usage and GC time say for multiple servers that are part of a particular application.

[echwallah]

I agree Roger. A

[RobK]

Now that DNAM (DCRUM) is going end of life in little over a year, users are going to be forced to Dynatrace and there is going to be an influx of people sorely disappointed with the lack of reporting ability in the application. We use DNAM almost exclusively for reporting and can't find much hope in Dynatrace Managed to match our business need. At least APP Mon had a usable report section, Dynatrace is severely limited in even basic reporting functionality...

https://community.dynatrace.com/spaces/160/open-q-a_2/questions/233718/dnam-goes-end-of-life-32121-w...

[eric_eiswerth]

Hi Roman,

I have multiple enterprise customers who require the ability to export PDF reports of captured data and dashboards. It is a capability that is expected by the business.

[RomanW]

Erik, dashboard reports where built exactly for that premise of empowering users to build their custom reports. A dashboard will allow users to slice, dice and chart any given metric in any given fashion (line chart, pie chart, ...). Since dashboards are the tool for custom visualizations, we want this to work for reporting use cases as well (hence the reporting/subscription level-up). Would you think your customers could try to build their reports using Dynatrace' dashboarding capabilities?

[echwallah]

I think Roman we are misunderstanding one another in this discussion. What am asking is in Dynatrace feature roadmap is there a Reporting feature to explicitly click and drag drop dimensions/tabulate/cross-tab metrics and just export to any format like excel/pdf. Not to view on a dashboard or tile but to buil a report and export. Just a drag/click and drop easy report design feature. Let me explain what I mean. For instance in Access(Microsoft) it simply has a panel saying reports whereby one can design their own report in a WYSIWIG kind of way. Thats what I mean

[RomanW]

As said below, we already have such a concept for dashboards and will foster those to work for reporting as well. We won't go into the lengths you're describing above, since this is not exactly in scope of Dynatrace. For such advanced report building/layouting, we however have comfortable APIs, which can be consumed by reporting tools (e.g. PowerBI).

[echwallah]

I still strongly believe that they should ask their Developers to build Reporting Capabilities. I also disagree with the comment that since Reporting is not its core function then it is not necessary to put it as functionality. Like earlier mentioned 99% of my clients want this feature out of the box not to use other ways or tools. I believe that should mean something. Same way Access is a DBMS but has a function to create reports. Reporting is a crucial functionality in any solution Enterprisewide that has access to data.

This power should be shared to clients by adding the functionality

[RomanW]

Strategically, Dynatrace will morph into more of a software intelligence platform, where it will be possible to build apps on top of the core Dynatrace (either by us or by partners). A full-fledged report builder is a likely candidate to be one such app. However, until then we'll foster our existing dashboarding capabilities for custom reports and would be looking for feedback in terms of which exact visualizations your customers are missing?

[echwallah]

I think we are really overstretching the conversation. I will emphasize it again. Speaking for myself, my customers do not want to look for another tool just to design and export reports from Dynatrace which is already familiar and can access the data it retrieves. They just want an inbuilt feature to design their own reports which can be exported in any format. Dashboards and tiles are just to visualize which is pretty neat but beyond that, our top-level execs do not want to have to log in to look at a dashboard. They want us to design and schedule reports from the tool to just send o heir emails in pdf

[RomanW]

Commenting on your statement that "our top-level execs do not want to have to log in to look at a dashboard. They want us to design and schedule reports from the tool to just send o heir emails in pdf"

Dashboard reports coming with 1.184 do all the things you mentioned there, except the formant not being a PDF. The scheduled emails contain a link, which doesn't require the recipient to log in, but opens the dashboard immediately. This is one single click, just like opening a PDF, but with the added benefit of showing live data and being interactive (supporting drill-downs).

Please check it out, once you have access to an environment with 1.184 or beyond and provide feedback. Thanks!

[mkulov]

Hi Roman,

How customers would be able to fulfill "print the report and bring it to the meeting" management request?

[kalle_lahtinen]

The dashboard reports are a welcome feature, but the PDF export is still missing. This is something that CAS used to have, is there some technical restriction why the same couldn't be done with Dynatrace Managed? We have several customer environments in secure networks with very limited access; the idea of the e-mail link simply does not work.

[echwallah]

We could at least get a Print feature of a report rather than use the Browser print feature so that the solution can render the print just within the environment. Here we can print dashboards or even the OOTB reports. This can just be a bare minimum if reporting is a huge task

[echwallah]

What really is the technical difficulty in Dynatrace utilizing any API used by all reporting tools and incorporating it into the solution. I want to understand why that is maybe a technical impossibility. Why dont they try it and just evaluate the feedback from the clients and see if am wrong. The reaction will be overwhelming

[echwallah]

Hey @Roman W. I feel you completely Misunderstand me here in what am trying to say. We are talking about the same thing but we are on a tangent

[RomanW]

I completely understand your point and I'm trying to tell you what you can realistically expect in the near to mid term. 🙂

The short answer is (as disappointing as it may be) that we won't build what you're proposing. The longer answer is below. So if you're interested, I'd love to hear your feedback for dashboard reports, once you've had the chance to try them... Thanks!

[echwallah]

Hi @Roman W. This does not really help my clients use case but I appreciate your long/short answer

[echwallah]

At the very least we should have what DCRUM had and Printing capabilities