Report Usage Telemetry

Hello friends,

I wanted to start a discussion about report usage telemetry. I am an in the Business Intelligence department at our organization and we are trying to better understand how our customers are using the various EPM tools and reports. We would like to track both custom reports (developed in Application Studio) and out-of-the-box reports in "Financial Reporting." We also have many customers using EPM Office Integration for Excel and would like to track this usage as well. What methods, tools, etc.. are you using to track your report usage on the EPM platform? We feel that report usage telemetry is critical to supporting our customers especially with the various BI tools that they can access. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions on this subject.

Thank you

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Comments

gottesheim-daniela

We only track custom AppStudio reports. Each of our custom reports includes a report action which calls an AppEngine script that inserts several parameters (e.g. report name, company,...) in a table in our relational database. Based on this information we can track which report has been opened or which report has not been used at all.

0911060553270289.pdf

kdickman

Thank you for the information Daniela. Does this approach work for Multi-Tenant cloud customers?

kdickman

I would be interested in hearing if INFOR has or is working on a method for tracking report usage for the out-of-the-box reports in Financial Reporting. Would this be of interest to others?

John Robson

We - Infor - are starting to track dashboard usage so that we can perhaps retire unused ones or further optimise the use of heavily used ones. It will however be a long time before they can all be tracked.

The app engine process is the one I would endorse - a simple on load action can be used on any App Studio report perhaps writing a row to a table in the EPM staging DB. The detail tracked would vary - some people just want to know of a report is used, others who uses them and how often etc.

kdickman

At a minimum we would like to know how many times a report has been opened, but ideally we would like to know who opened it and when. Could you expound on how we might be able to use App Engine to accomplish this? I have been using App Studio for a couple of years, but am not familiar with App Engine. There are some trainings on the WIKI site but they appear to be outdated. Are there some resources you could provide or point me to on how to create this report action script?

John Robson

Hopefully someone can share a fuller example with you but here is one of the buildong blocks - an App Engine process to add a record to an SQL table.

#define EngineVersion 5.0
#define RuntimeVersion 5.0

bool SQL_InsertInto(string sqlID, string sqlDescription)
@Description: "John Robson: Add a row to an existing SQL Table in Staging on the MT Cloud.";
@Parameter[sqlID]: "Row ID. This MUST be unique.";
@Parameter[sqlDescription]: "Row Description.";
@Category: "SQL";
@Returns: "True if insert suceeds else False";
{
//The sample adds a row to a simple sample table (called DimTest) with two varchar columns
//The process returns True if the record can be added else False.
//Last revised by John Robson 8-Nov-23 and saved as SQL_InsertInto_v3.BS

string errorMessage = "";
int errorCode = 0;
bool ret = false; //Return code

try
{
//the using construct creates a temporary connection to the Staging DB and this obviates the need to close the connection explcitly.
using (SQLConnection conn = SQLCreateNamedConnection("Staging")) //Staging is the Name (Alias) of the cloud database
using (SQLPreparedCommand cmd = SQLCreatePreparedCommand(conn, "INSERT INTO dimTest (ID,English) VALUES (@ID,@DESCRIPTION)"))
{
SQLBindStringParameter(cmd, "@ID", sqlID);
SQLBindStringParameter(cmd, "@DESCRIPTION", sqlDescription);
int sqlRows = SQLExecuteNonQuery(cmd,15); //The second parameter - 15 is the timeout in seconds. Inserts on an indexed table should take less than 1 seconds.
}
//NotifyDebug("Process SQL_InsertInto - Records inserted: " + ToString(sqlRows)); //Allows the process to give interactive feedback to help test it.
ret = true; //The process didn't fail so infer record was added.
}
catch (errorMessage, errorCode)
{
NotifyError("Process SQL_InsertInto failed. Error code: " + errorCode + " Error message: " + errorMessage);
ret = false;
}
return ret;
}

The big picture of how to call App Engine from App Studio, how to publish AE process, how to create and index SQL tables really needs experience. Your best approach would probably be to bring in a consultant to mentor for a day as there are a lot of moving parts.

Peter Mayall

Writing an Application Engine script won't work for Infor pre-packaged content reports. One solution is to create an application log for the Application Studio "Report Load" event. This can only be enabled for a maximum of 24 hours at a time. The results can be export to a CSV file for analysis.

0911060553270289.pdf

gottesheim-daniela

I can't give you an answer to that, since we are on-prem

kdickman

Thank you!

james-siena

Good old page counters! More websites should bring this back.

We created something similar to this as a proof of concept late last year. It uses a lot of the same concepts mentioned below of using on load report action except it doesn't use app engine. Feel free to reach out if you want more information on how this was done.

It uses one table in staging to store report usage details (report, user, count, etc). It uses one report to give you a dashboard/report - slicing the data in staging various ways.

james-siena

We have a solution with a lighter footprint. Please reach out if you would like more info and we will be glad to go into detail.

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