report manager limitation

[psharma]

At Splash we have been using report manager for email delivery of reports to external partners. These are outside partners with minimum technical skills and want CSV reports delivered with data. We ended up solving his need using report manager plugin. There are several issues with report manager plugin that we have experienced in last few months and I wanted to understand if there is a different more stable and feature rich option for us.

List of issues I am tracking

1. No way for Sisense users to see who is on the email list, other than admins. Only Admins see the report manager tab. I would like users to manage or be able to review who is getting the reports.
2. Email delivery is limited, who gets a report to answer I need to review each job manually.
3. Error notification is never sent to the default email or the email provided in the job setup often due to server failure
4. Intermittent failures with report delivery due to limitation on delivery efficiency or create some retry logic, to queue emails for retry
5. Self serve ability, without buying more licenses how do we enable external partners to have a robust reporting platform where they can self serve. Example when they login they have access to a suite of reports that are canned reports ready to download each day.
6. No SFTP delivery mechanism
7. All report manager jobs appear in a list view, it is very cumbersome to manage

I would like to understand how else can I leverage Sisense to build feature rich reporting capability.
Let me know if you have a moment to connect. We have our sync coming up June 1st, but we can also connect prior to that. (edited) 

[HamzaJ]

Hey @psharma ,

We are also using the RM and I can find myself in a few of the issues that you are tracking. I do not know if they will be picked up soon, so perhaps you have something from the way we have fixed / workedaround some of the things.

1. I believe it is true only admins can see all reports. However within the RM role -api you can set that other roles can also create/edit/delete/view reports that they have created themselves. 

2. We workedaround this issue by importing the Sisense Application DB. It has a few collections from the report manager. This way we can easily create a dashboard with an overview of the reports and send information.

3. / 4. / 5. I have not experienced this yet so no workaround for that / we have unlimited license

6. It does support SFTP. Available for all or specified on a group level. The documentation shows you how to set it up.

7. Fixed this with point 2. 

Hopefully the above gives you some inspiration to workaround a few issues while you are discussing things with Sisense

Hamza

[psharma]

Thanks @HamzaJ 

If there a documentation you can link me to for RM role -api you can set that other roles can also create/edit/delete/view reports that they have created themselves. 

Can you elaborate on #2 please. How do you import Sisense Application DB and what are the collections from the report manager? Maybe there is a feature to import Sisense application DB data that I am not aware of because if thats the case I can solve a few other problems as well, like lineage analysis of what views are used in ElastiCube's. Currently I don't have a way to do this.

We workedaround this issue by importing the Sisense Application DB. It has a few collections from the report manager.

[HamzaJ]

Sure.

Here is a link to the docs: https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.sisense.com/Marketplace/ReportManager2/fgi99ty-987d-3498-dd6h-sdfdere4... 

See the chapter Settings Permission

Sisense Application DB 

So the following steps is depended on your sisense version. If you do not see this option, then its not needed.

Go to Admin>System Management >Configuration>Manage connectors>Mongodb

scroll down and enable : sisenseInternalAccess.value

Then create a cube , add data, mongodb:

Thats it. You can now import data regarding dashboards , widgets, reports and more

[fschleich]

Hello,

I just want to let you know I share most of the concerns reported here.

Thanks,

Franck Schleich

[slosada]

Hi @psharma ,

Thank you for your submission to the Product Feedback Forum! It is important for the Sisense Product team to understand what users are voting for, so to ensure that each idea is as clear as possible, we ask that only one idea is submitted per post. Although you are more than free to submit multiple ideas, please make sure that each individual idea submission is related to a SINGLE idea.

Since this submission contains multiple requests, I have marked this submission as Needs Info.

[psharma]

@slosada These are not ideas, they are concerns or lack of features in report manager thereoff.
I would like to add another complaint:
Every time there is a release something or the other in the report manager breaks. This breaks the trust between us and our report recipients and in turn also breaks trust between us the sisense.

Examples: recent release that broke CSV exported and we have urgent reports that were delivered with dates jumbled up. Sisense this accept this as a bug and then resolved it, however such incidents leads to break in trust.

Since you have marked this submission as Needs Info, what more information do you need?

[psharma]

@HamzaJ You said: 7. Fixed this with point 2.

I am specifically looking to add more organization in the way reports manager jobs are listed in a list view making it difficult to manager. We have over 50 jobs that I would like to be able to put in folders and there is no way to create folders at the moment. This is a small example.
I would also like to manage recipients groups and set those groups at folder level. So when I get a request "can you add these 4 recipients to all the jobs for the party X" I can just edit a group instead of having to manage each of their 50 jobs.

@HamzaJ Can you explain how you fixed this?

[HamzaJ]

Hey @psharma ,

I agree that the RM overview is lacking certain capabilities that make managing easier. What we did was create a dashboard with the information from the MongoDB to make it (atleast) easier to search and filter through the reports. (we have 787 reports as of this moment). 

This does not solve your mentioned issue, but for us it did make it more manageable. 

Regarding your groups and reports; It is possible to set a group as recipient. So it would be possible to create several groups and add those groups to specific reports. If a user needs to start/stop receiving a certain report you could add/remove them from that user-group. Might not be ideal, batch management of reports would be preferred, however it could save you some time short term.

Hamza

[olegfil]

@psharma  @HamzaJ  i'd like to inform that starting Sisense version L2023.11 and report manager version 1.10.6, viewers access for report manager is added as a feature. The updated manual has the instructions of how to set it up