One question that comes up frequently is how Service Manager reports can be scheduled. The good news: This can be done, hooray! The bad news: It cannot be done using the Service Manager console and it can be a bit complicated depending on the report you are interested in 😦 In this blog post I will show how to create a scheduled report for Incidents.

The screenshots are from a german installation. Hope this is not too confusing.

Step 1 – Prerequisites

Before you can use scheduled reports you have to check different configurations. Without these steps the reports will not be automatically generated. First of all, you must check if the SQL Reporting Services Instance you are using for reporting “knows” which mail server it should use. To check and configure that, start the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and connect to the correct Reporting Services Instance. Then check and configure the mail settings.

Keep in mind that you must configure relaying on the mail server if you want to send reports by mail to external users. Next, make sure the SQL Server Agent for the Reporting Services Instance is set to “Automatic” and is started. After that you are ready to go.

Step 2 – Report Scheduling

Connect to the following URL: http://ssrs-server/reports (URL may vary depending on the SSRS configuration). Then browse to the report you want to schedule. In this example I use the Report “List of Incidents” in the Incidents folder. With this report it’s possible to list all Incidents that were created during a specific time range. I want to use this for a weekly report that will be sent to different people by mail. When the report parameters are displayed, select “New Subscription”.

Select how the reports should be delivered – I choose E-Mail and therefore select the recipients, sender address, subject and the format of the report. You can also generate reports and deliver them to a shared folder.

Now you must define the schedule for the report. I want to deliver the report weekly, every sunday evening.

Now comes the most complex part, the report parameters (not really complex). Two things we must configure are the start date and end date. I this example I set the end date to “today” and the start date to “today minus 1 week”. Two parameters we also have to provide a value for – even they are not needed at all – are hard-coded start and end dates (these will be ignored).

Now you can provide values for the different parameters. For this example I choose the default values for all parameters. The only parameter that needs intervention is “Affected CIs”. I just hit the check box to use the default value, that’s it.

Now hit OK to save the configuration are you’re done! You can always check and reconfigure your subscriptions by using the menu “My Subscriptions”.

Step 3 – Check results

Depending on the configured schedule you will receive an email with a PDF attachment. I will look something like this:

As you can see, report scheduling is possible with Service Manager, but not in a very convenient way. Hope this will change when the next version of Service Manager will be released later this year. For now, you can/must use the described solution – but it works like a charm 🙂

regards
Marcel