Top 5 Reports

Rick M · 07-10-2008, 09:49 PM

What are the top 5 reports your IT Manager asks for?

ddkppp · 07-11-2008, 03:56 PM

Everything of which about .5% Altiris has out of the box and the other 90% are crazy insane for a non-sql person to generate. That being said.. :P

Specifically, we have been asked to produce things like:

1) Count of computers by department
2) Count of aged computers by department
3) Count of models of computers by department
4) SLA report from helpdesk
- SLA for all of IT
- SLA by specific queue (ie group)
- SLA by worker

We, sadly, haven't dug that deep into reporting simply that it always seemed that the report either didn't exist or the data wasn't available. For example, some of the data for the computer reports comes from asset while the rest from inventory. Combining those two products to produce a report with the data needed can be a pain. Helpdesk pretty much doesn't have any SLA functionality out of the box at all. So you have to build a system to flag tickets that are approaching resolution and response SLA's. Then trying to write a custom report to give that data back, again, is a pain.

I have heard though that reporting is a focus in 7.0 so maybe things will be easier.

Rick M · 07-11-2008, 06:47 PM

Interesting reply...I haven't had much use with reports either, which is why I asked the question. Generally I have only made simple reports to see who has a specific app on their machines and what versions. This is a one off type of thing.

I would like to provide my manager with some good stuff weekly and have yet to see anything too impressive, then again I am only just beginning to try to really provide something approaching a justification of Altiris.

skakid · 07-14-2008, 09:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ddkppp

Helpdesk pretty much doesn't have any SLA functionality out of the box at all. So you have to build a system to flag tickets that are approaching resolution and response SLA's. Then trying to write a custom report to give that data back, again, is a pain.

It can be a serious pain depending on how much detail you want to go into, but it's entirely possible to get that information without going into massive customization mode.

By adding more detailed lookups types under status you can do a datediff to get the amount of time passed between those status types.

For example: Our flow goes like this -

When a ticket is opened it is set to "NEW" status.
From there it may get assigned to another team. It will obviously then go to the "ASSIGNED" status. From this note until we reach the point another team has contacted the customer we're measuring "Time to Respond". We end that measurement whenever the ticket changes to a "CONTACTED" "RESOLVED" or "CLOSED" status.
We continue the measurement of the ticket until it reaches a "RESOLVED" status to get a "Time to Resolve" measurement.
Obviously the same is said for "Closed" and "Time to Close"

All are fairly easy to work out if you spend a little bit of time on them. When it gets difficult is when you want to exclude holidays, weekends, and off hours for SOME, but not ALL category types. That's when you can call in some help from others.
We had Expressability help us out with that stuff. Along with some trickier reports on First Call Resolution that we wanted to measure differently than the out of box report did.

skakid · 07-14-2008, 09:21 AM

Back to the original purpose of this thread.

My #1 requested report is a list of x product installed and the "owner" and "owner's Department" for that workstation.

After that it really changes. Once I write a report that someone will need over and over again it usually gets set on the Shortcuts tab and I go on writing reports for the next request.

Socrates · 07-14-2008, 02:18 PM

#1: Installed number of X application
#2: Count of platforms per site
#3: Number of Winterms still floating on the network
#4: How many machines are not up to snuff per department for upgrade to XP
#5: How many machines are out of warranty

acallahan1 · 04-29-2009, 01:11 PM

The #1 report my management asks for is:
Count of computers by locations divided into desktops/laptops.

I have attempted this report for years but this is certainly important now with Pandemic responses being defined.

tdiehm · 04-29-2009, 02:19 PM

I'd say about 90% of the reports I'm asked for these days involve software and patch installations (what computers have software or patch X installed).

The problem comes in when they ask me which computers DO NOT have software or patch X installed, as apparently there is no way to do this in Altiris/SQL without some serious SQL ninja skills.

Dan Reynolds · 04-29-2009, 07:37 PM

Patch vulnerability reports are the most useful for me. For example, a week after a patch is deployed, how many PCs are still vulnerable?

To get a quick 'report' of which PCs DO NOT have a particular app, I create a collection of PCs that have it, then exclude that collection from a clone of the ALL Computers collection.