Reporting Engine

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Reporting Engine

Nerdio Manager's Reporting Engine is a powerful tool that allows you to create comprehensive reports about your customers' environments, with deep customization of the metrics you report on and how they're displayed.

The Reporting Engine is built on two components:

  • Data Collectors are background tasks that run on a scheduled or ad-hoc basis to collect and store data about configured tenants and accounts, which is then used as the basis for reports.

    The following Data Collectors are available as part of the Reporting Engine:

    • Users: Data about users, including their details, numbers, roles, status, and licenses.

    • Groups: Data about Group types and assignments.

    • Tenants: Data about your managed customer environments, including domains, storage settings, regions, and subscriptions.

    • Secure Score: Data about your customer tenants' Microsoft Secure Score measurements.

    • Solution Baselines: Data about your customer tenants' status relative to your configured Solution Baselines.

  • The Report Builder allows you to configure customized reports in sections:

    • Each section represents a single metric that can be reported against. Sections are grouped by Data Collector.

    • For each Data Collector, you can select multiple sections to add to the report, and, where applicable, configure the type of chart (table, pie chart, line graph, etc.) you want to display for the reported metric.

    • A rich text editor allows you to format the report to your style requirements, add custom introductory or explanatory text, and determine the position of placeholders such as report name, description, and date.

    • Reports can be viewed in your browser or as a downloadable PDF, which you can also choose to email to nominated recipients.

Availability

This feature is in Public Preview.

Limitations and known issues

Issue/limitation

Impact

Mitigation/planned fix

Large amounts of data - especially in table form - can cause PDF page and/or file size limits to be exceeded

  • Table columns may overrun PDF page margins, rendering them unreadable.

  • PDF files above 25MB in size exceed email file attachment limitations and will cause the email send operation to fail.

  • Very large PDF files may fail to generate altogether due to memory errors.

  • Switch the PDF page orientation to landscape to allow more columns to display on a page.

  • Limit the number of table rows to display.

Role-based access control (RBAC) and permissions

The following matrix shows the Reporting Engine permissions associated with built-in Nerdio Manager roles :

Built-in Role MSP-Level Data Collectors MSP-Level Reports Account-Level Data Collectors Account-Level Reports
Account Admin False False False False
Account Help Desk False False True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)
End User False False False False
MSP Admin True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)		 False
MSP Billing Admin False False False False
MSP Help Desk True
(Full permissions)		 Create, Page, Read, Update True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)
MSP IT Admin True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)		 False False
MSP Sales Page, Read Page, Read False False
Super Admin True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)		 True
(Full permissions)

Procedures

The following procedures guide you through configuring and managing Reporting Engine:

Deployment considerations

       Required resources

Unless otherwise configured, Reporting Engine uses your default MSP-level Azure storage account to store reporting data. Azure storage accounts offer an optimal balance of price and performance for report data compared to other resources like Nerdio’s SQL Server, or more advanced storage options like Data Lakes.

       Additional resources

If you prefer to use a dedicated storage account for reporting data, you can link an existing storage account or create a new storage account at the MSP level under Settings > Integrations .

For customers who want to limit the amount of information that leaves their own tenants, Data Collectors can also be configured to store reporting data at the account level. Before you can configure account-level storage for reporting data, you must first link an Azure subscription and resource group to the account.

       Scaling considerations

Data collection jobs are RAM intensive, especially when running over large amounts of data and/or when multiple Data Collectors are run simultaneously, and can negatively impact the performance of your Nerdio Manager. To mitigate possible performance issues in large deployments:

  • Run Data Collectors outside of regular business hours

  • Stagger data collection jobs so that only a single Data Collector is running at any one time

  • When configuring Data Collectors, ensure that they are assigned only to accounts for which you (or the account holder) require the applicable report data. This helps prevent unnecessary allocation of compute and storage resources.

Help and support

       Contact us

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