Orion Reports - Something Other Than Excel 2003 Format

I don't see any option to save scheduled reports from Orion in any format other than Excel 2003 (XLS). I know CSV and PDF are options, but they are not feasible.

Is there a way to save in a not-so-antiquated Excel format (XLSX)? If not, might there be a feature request out there that I can add on to?

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rschroeder

I recommend building your own new Feature Request for this.

Then building a separate poll for it to see what options other users may wish. If you can find five or six (or more?) other formats that people would like to use instead of Excel 97-2003, all the better!

For me, my Reports export in an older version of Excel, just as yours do. But I have no problem opening them with newer versions of Excel, or saving them to newer versions while IN a newer version of Excel.

What challenges are you facing with the older version of Excel? Maybe sharing some of your specific Excel 2003 problems or ideas with us will shake lose some ideas from the forum, and might generate a good alternate answer or two for you.

chucksimalchik

The issue we're running into now is sending an automated feed in to our new problem ticketing system to populate the CMDB. They'd prefer it in a newer Excel format.

CSV would also work for them, but the feed contains fields that can contain commas, so even if I clean the data in our custom properties, no guarantee a comma won't be entered in the future. So that's out. And there's no option for a different field delimiter either (another nice format/feature possibility). If I could delimit with a | or something else, that would work.

I have a Powershell script that can change the format, but it essentially opens and re-saves the file. Works fine locally, but Excel needs to be installed on the machine executing the script. I need to run this on a server in production to automate this for a nightly feed, and we don't install Excel on servers here.

I'm all ears for any other thoughts or suggestions!!!

rschroeder

I'm sorry, I have no helpful ideas for immediately fixing this. Your solution sounds as graceful as it can be.

Unless someone else offers a solution, it's time to submit a Feature Request for this. I'll vote for it!

rfroembgen

Maybe Powershell in combination with the SWIS-API could help you there. If you pull data from solarwinds using swis, it will stream the data into an array. You can access the fields separatly and put them into a .csv-format with your own delimiters. Excel will then not be needed on the server and you can keep commas in your custom properties.

You could also schedule this powershell script via Windows Scheduled Tasks or trigger it with an alert through orion based on events.

Regards

Rene

chucksimalchik

FYI, I got around to putting in a feature request for this. I appreciate the thoughts. Rene, I had considered something similar and we might go down that road as well. Appreciate the input.