Audit content reports

Dominic Albrecht shared this question 6 years ago
Answered

Hi There


I am trying to determine the least used reports in my instance of YF, and it seems I would need to edit the audit reports. I would like to know which reports I could remove, and I am struggling to get to the bottom of this as I have many co-displayed reports which dont display results in the same way as the parent reports.


Is there any kind of documentation relating to the use of the YF database to build your own audit reports ?

Replies (8)

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Hi Dominic,


Thanks for getting in touch about this. While the audit reports are generally pretty powerful out of the box, there are certainly some areas where they could offer a little more insight. The nice thing about all of the Audit content is that it is just like any other Yellowfin material that can be edited and changed to suit whatever your needs are. In your case this may include editing the view that the Audit content is based off of, as only a small fraction of the fields from the configuration database are used in the prebuilt view. (If you've spent time in the configuration database, I bet you can guess why we left most of the less useful information out.)


Perhaps I'm not quite understanding your use case fully, but there are series of 'Top/Bottom N' reports that come packaged with the audit material. Based on your initial post, I would surmise that these already existing reports can be massaged into what you're after. However, you are free to make any changes to the Admin Audit view that would help create the reports that you may be looking for. The catch there is that we unfortunately don't have extensive public-facing documentation regarding the configuration database. (This is because making direct modifications to the configuration database is not supported and can often lead to unexpected and undesirable results.)


If you could have a look at the series of 'Top/Bottom N' reports to see if those meet your needs, and then perhaps fleshing out your use case to me if they don't, that would be great. Thanks in advance!


Best,

-Conner

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Thanks for the feedback Conner.


I wasn't able to find any "Bottom N" reports but I have looked into the view and picked out what I thought is the most relevant information. The data does get quite confusing, as it seems that YF see's reports and append / union queries as the same thing. I have 7900 named reports, but 55000 total queries (reports, and queries total).


Perhaps you could give me your take on how to address my situation:

I am migrating my existing version of YF from its current environment, onto a new dedicated server (with increased RAM etc) with a view to increasing speed.

We have been running on this current environment for the past 4 years, and have accumulated a lot of reports as I have indicated above. Many of the reports are co-displayed and are sent by email distribution to users. I would ideally like to remove the unneeded / unused reports in order to clean the environment and improve the usability.

I need a way of identifying the unused / unneeded report easily - as I am sure you can understand that working through 7900 reports one by one is not practical.


Lastly - is there a way to identify all the schedules which are currently active, and is there a way to identify the parent report along with all the child reports (co-displayed reports).


Thanks

Dom

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Hi Dom,


In the Admin Audit bundle the reports that I though may be helpful to you are called 'Bottom N Dashboards' and 'Bottom 10 Reports by Views', but if you're already deep into the Audit view, then these may be a little basic for your needs.


Regarding the rest of your current migration project, I think we can break it down into a couple of pieces. First would be the actual migration, and then would come the content cleanup. Both of these tasks toe the line between what the Support team is able to help with, and what we would have to hand off to our Consulting team and their paid-for services. I'll do my best to cover what we can from the Support side, but just be aware that at some point this case may fall out of our jurisdiction, so to speak.


The migration will depend on how your Yellowfin instance is set up. Since I don't have any insight at this point into your installation it's difficult for me to make suggestions. When you have a second, can you give me a brief rundown on how your installation is set up? For example, does the Yellowfin configuration database live on the same physical server as the application, or is the RDBMS located elsewhere?


In my opinion, cleaning up the content would be best suited for after the server migration. As you noted, mopping up 7,900 reports one-by-one would be incredibly time consuming. The only way to truly automate and expedite the process would be to structure some custom SQL queries to run against the configuration database. (This is where the paid-for consulting would come in, as they're quite adept at working on projects like this.) Some of the data structuring and tables in the config DB is intuitive, however things are generally pretty obfuscated and web-like in there.


To answer your questions though, all of Yellowfin's schedule information is found in the 'TaskSchedule' table. From there, you can filter on the values relevant to your questions. Figuring out what reports are co-display child reports can be done by looking at the 'ReportDescription' column in the 'ReportHeader' table. Quick disclaimer here, I'm providing this information so that you may use and modify the Admin Audit package to identify what may be ripe for a cleanout. For obvious reasons, we cannot support clients running queries directly against the configuration DB.


Please let me know if you have any additional questions, or if I should get the consulting side of things.


Thanks!

-Conner

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Hi Dom,


Just checking in on this one to see if you had any questions on my previous post, or if I should ask our consulting team to reach out to you. If you could let me know when you have a few minutes, that would be great.


Thanks!

-Conner

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Thanks Conner - I havent had a chance to spend much time on this over the last few weeks but will revisit as soon as I have some time.

I am happy if you want to close this ticket at this time.

Thanks for your assistance.

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Hi Dom,


Sounds good to me, I'll go ahead and mark this one as closed for now. If you want to reopen it in the future to avoid starting from ground zero again, you can just toss a fresh post into this Community thread and it should come back across my desk.


Thanks,

-Conner

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Hi,

May I know which audit report is concerned here as I need to track some event and hope can get some useful information besides that from backend Event table.

Thanks and regards

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Hi Steven,

I hope all is well,

I can see that you have raised a similar question within our Community questioning Audit Reports, if we could continue in that ticket, that would be great.

Regards,

Mark

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