Reports

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Introduction

IT organizations rely on the most up-to-date and actionable data at their fingertips to ensure stability and business continuity. The reports and analytics built into SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) are designed to provide you with high visibility into your service desk operations, letting you pinpoint bottlenecks and address inefficiencies quickly and easily.

The reports provided via the Analytics section of SWSD cover a wide range of topics and are fully customizable and editable to hone in on the specific data you want to review.

Benefits

• The index and reports pages share the same process for filters and parameters to allow for easy customization of data output. (See List view for information on customizing.)
• By creating a rectangle over an area of your report data (over the bars in breakdown reports or the timeline in reports over-time) you can zoom in to obtain a more granular view.
• The X- and Y-axis are clearly labeled.
• Enjoy consistency around text, colors, labels, bars, and data formats across all reports.

Navigation

Analytics > Reports.

Access reports and report data

Everyone has access to the Reports module, but each person can see only the data they have permissions to see in those reports. For example, if someone doesn’t have permission to view Asset data then that person won't be able to see asset data in a report.

Report types

On the left pane of your screen is a table of contents for the different types of reports.

My reports

The My Reports section shows the reports you have created and saved.

Templates

Templates is a repository of all out-of-the-box reports, broken down by category.

If you are unsure which report holds the information you are looking for, consider the following facts and questions to better understand reports categorization.

Menu entry	Description
All Templates	Displays all the reports you have access to.
Incidents Management	The Incidents Management section is made up of several reports that all focus on different aspects of how incidents are addressed. The reports can answer questions such as: What is the weekly volume of incidents trend that were created per site? What are the most popular service catalogs that were used in each site? How many incidents, per chosen time frame, were opened from a closed state, per department? How many tickets were worked by a specific group and what was their mean time to resolution? What does my agent's performance and output look like? How many tickets per agent are still open? Should the load balancing be re-evaluated? See Incidents Management reports for more information on the specific reports available.
Time Centric	Time Centric contains Reports that directly correlate tickets with the time spent by agents to work on and resolve those tickets. These reports provide answers to questions such as: Was I able to decrease my team's average resolution time or the age of the incidents I still have in the queue? Which category has the slowest time to receive a response? How many work hours were spent per site on each Service Category? What is the reason for the drop/rise in trends? Additional information is available in Reports: Time Centric.
Service Level Management	Service Level Management reports provide statistics as they relate to workload and SLA breaches. They can help provide focus in answering questions such as: Which incident categories have the biggest number of breaches each month? How does the percentage of incidents with SLA breaches change over time?
Customer Satisfaction	View reports based on customer feedback on tickets.
Tasks Management	Reports on the number of tasks and their resolution, answering questions such as: What is Task Throughput and what does it mean to users? How are Tasks distributed among different categories? Additional information is available on Tasks management.
Problems/Changes/Releases	Problems/Changes/Releases provides a comparative analysis of the tickets falling under the described categories. For more on Problems/Changes/Releases reports, see Reports - Problems: Change over time.
Solutions Management	Solutions Management reports focus on which solutions work best for the agents in your organization. They analyze questions such as: How many solutions do I have in each site, broken down by subcategory? How many assets were created over time or by field of interest?
Asset Management	With Asset Management you can: Review how many assets were created over time and/or field of interest View the results in a Stack chart by field of interest. See Reports: Asset management for more information on the specific reports available.
Chat	Chat analyzes how chats are used within SWSD to address tickets. How often are agents responding to tickets via chat? How often are chats accepted by an agent that was started by a requester? (Provides a breakdown per site and/or department.) Additional information is available on Reports: Chat reports.
Heatmap	View the distribution of the created incidents over the hours of the week,
Ticket Forwarding Breakdown	ESM customers can see statistics for tickets that were forwarded to or from a specific service provider. You can click Edit and select the Parameters tab to see the time scope (time ticket was forwarded) and change the time frame parameter (last 7 days, last 14 days, etc.) as needed.

ESM customers can rename Incidents. For example, the Facilities service provider might label them Work Requests, while HR might name them Issues, and Legal might call them Tickets. In all of these examples, SWSD treats them the same and just changes the name referenced throughout the application. All reports are adjusted to use the selected name.

View reports

To view all reports you have access to, navigate to Analytics > Reports.

Reports landing page

The Reports landing page can be presented in List or Gallery view.

Both views let you drag-and-drop reports in the order you wish for them to display.

List View

Select List for List View.

• This view is recommended when you have many reports. It consolidates the text on your screen to display an increased number of report descriptions to assist in locating the specific report you need.

• This view is also preferred by veteran users who are familiar with their reports and can easily navigate to the report they need.

Gallery View

Select Gallery for Gallery View.

Gallery view is recommended when you are not certain of which report will address your inquiry. The gallery tiles provide visual information that can help you make a decision.

Edit and filter reports

In each report, you can edit and filter the data to focus on specific areas of interest. The example below focuses on a report from the Incident Management section for the report titled Incidents Over Time.

Edit

1. To edit the content displaying in the report, click Add Filter.

2. In the new Edit View pane to the left of the report, select the PARAMETERS tab to set new parameters for report criteria. The parameter options can change based on the specific report you are viewing.

   • Time Frame: All, Last day, Last 14 days, Last 30 days, Last 60 days, Last 90 days, Week to date, Month to day, Last week, or Last month.
   • Resolution: Day, week, month or hour
   • Time Scope: Created Time, Assignment Time, Resolved Time, Closed Time, First Touch Resolution, or Due Date Time
   • Stack By: None, State, Assignee, Group Assignment, Requester, Site, Department, Category, Subcategory, and all other ticket fields
   • Limit: Refers to the number of bars that will be presented in the report

Filter

1. To edit the content displaying in the report, click Add Filter.

2. In the new Edit View pane to the left of the report, select the Filter tab to establish attributes to determine the scope of the information you wish to display.

Edit the view of a specific report

Use icons

In each report, there are several icons in the upper right.

• Display lets you toggle between different report layouts.

• Save as New lets you save any changes you made while viewing the report. The saved report will display in the My Reports section.

  Some options are not available for all reports.

• Ellipsis lets you:

  • Export the report to PDF.
  • Show/hide labels. When you select to show labels, you will see the number of incidents in each stack by value.
  • Table view. Select this to open a new window that provides a clear view of each entity in the report.

  After you have created and saved a new report, the Ellipsis icon offers additional options. You can:

  • Schedule report.
  • Export to PDF.
  • Share. The report is a snapshot which does not auto-update, therefore the recipient will see the information presented by the specific time the report was saved for sharing.
  • Show labels.
  • Return to table view.
  • Delete the report.

See more granular data

Use Zoom Feature

In each report, you can zoom in on a specific section to see more granular data.

Place your cursor to the left of the data column you want to zoom in on, and then click and drag to the right to zoom.

To return to the original report format, click Reset zoom.

Drill down into data

In each report you can double-click on any data point to drill down into the data. A new tab in your browser opens displaying the data in list form.

Fore more information on customizing your view, see List view.

Schedule a report

1. Navigate to Analytics > Reports.

2. Use the pane on the left to navigate to Templates.
3. On the right select the template you want to use.
4. In the upper right, click Save as New .
5. Provide a new name for the report (consider amending the title to include Scheduled), and then click Save.

6. Click the ellipsis icon in the upper right .

7. From the drop-down menu, select Schedule report.

8. In the Schedule report dialog, provide recipients and time information, and then select output option(s), and then click Save.

   

Edit a report schedule

1. Select the scheduled report you want to edit.

2. Click the calendar icon at the top right.

   

3. Edit the scheduling parameters, and then click Save.

   

Related topics

• Analytics
• Reports - Contracts: Filter/Group contract reports by Start/End
• Reports - Incidents: Stack incidents by the Closed By field
• Reports - Problems: Change over time
• Risk management