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WHD Reporting methodology

Dear all,

For operational reasons I used the reporting tool from WHD to forecast resources or keep an eye on trends. Yesterday I've been asked to provide reports reflecting work load and work distribution within the various sections of the department. These reports will be used for a presentation for the president and will have impact on the resources in the years to come.

Because of the magnitude of the presentation I had a closer look at the reports. What I found out is that I don't understand the methodology and logic of how the reports and searches work. For instance:

If I create a report saying:

Row Category = Tech Group
Column Category = Month Opened
Report Filters = By Tech Troup
Table Data = Tickets
Time Range = January 2019
Date Attribute for Time Range - 01/01/2019 to 31/01/2019

I get a list of about 2,500 tickets, which should have been opened for the for 4x Tech Groups during the month of January 2019.

To be honest, in the past I believed that those tickets where opened and assigned to the section of the departments.

Now, looking closer into the ticket's history I don't understand the logic. 90% of the tickets will be opened by email assigned automatically to a Helpdesk queue (first Tech Group) and from here, based in the incident or query, assigned to a different Tech Group. Most of the tickets will be handled and closed with the second Tech Group. A low amount of those tickets will than be given to a third Tech Group and closed here.

Following this train of thoughts I expected that the majority of the tickets opened in the above mentioned report should be Helpdesk (as the first Tech Group which the ticket was assigned to). But this is not the case.

My questions are:

1.)

What is the logic behind the reports, and queries, to the above mentioned example?

2.)

Because I have to start somewhere - is it possible to generate a "snap shot" of the amount of tickets that where open (open, wip, pending etc) for a section?

(I am looking for this since a while now, but I have not found a solution for this)

Maybe somebody asked the same questions and found some answers. On Friday lunch time I have to provide the reports and it would be good if I could explain how the were created.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,

Eberhard

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Accepted answers

All comments

glisit

I've researched this same question and even called support to see if they could explain to me the logic (math) behind one particular report. As far as I know, there is no documentation of specific report logic available for reference. If you need it explained, you might get lucky by calling support. The tech I spoke with had to escalate it to a higher level tech as he didn't know the answer either.

This is one of the reasons why I am strongly advocating for either

a robust built-in reporting engine Per tech support said they would put a feature request, of which there are a few ancient ones already in place.
a way to tap into the database using PowerBI, Crystal Reports, or similar reporting application. Per tech support, there is no option to do this at this time.

mesverrum

To access the db in powerbi or similar you just would want to set up connection to the db, assuming you are using the internal postgres db you can follow these instructions

https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/Configure-access-to-an-embedded-PostreSQL-database-from-multiple-hosts

If you are using an external database then you just set those up with a service account that your analytics tool would use to pull data.

I haven't personally dug into the WHD database but a former colleague of mine had stood up a reporting tool in apache that he used as a sort of SSRS type tool to do custom reporting. He definitely complained about the same problems you describe with there being limited OOTB reporting data and needing to pick it apart to get what he really needed.

glisit

Thanks for the response! I tried but I think that because we chose to use our existing MS SQL server, that there are portions of the database that reside in Postgre. I tried to get WHD support to assist, but each tech I spoke to had no idea and could not provide me more info other than suggest a feature request. I keep exploring my options as there has to be a better way. At this point, I would even consider exploring migrating from SQL to Postgre if I could have a guarantee it would give me access to the data I need for reporting.

mesverrum

I'm almost 100% certain that nothing of value would remain in the local db if you are using MS SQL, its just a matter of figuring out where the data lives inside that database. You might reach out to my employer as we have a few people on staff who are intimately familiar with WHD, we actually run a hosted version of it as a SaaS cloud platform for people who don't want to host their own instance.

https://loop1.com/solarwinds/solarwinds-hosted-web-help-desk/