One of the things we’ve learned from our many years working in the software industry is that no matter what reports we come up and how much time we spend tweaking them, we’ll never meet the needs of all customers. Customizing reports is actually one of the most frequent requests of any software product, not just Office365Mon. In Office365Mon the reporting requirements are further complicated by the fact that many of you manage just a single Office 365 subscription, but others of you are resellers and so you may have many different subscriptions you are managing. Trying to find a one size fits all approach to reporting is pretty difficult.
Introducing Your Custom Reports
To support all of these competing needs, we’ve rolled out a new feature at Office365Mon today called Report Data Access. You’ll see it on the My Features page in the site:
We’ve enabled this feature for everyone, and given all current users six months of free access to it. When you Explore that feature you’ll be brought to a page that provides you with more information and download links. The content you can get here from here includes:
- Links to download your report data as CSV files. We’ve taken ALL of the data that we use to create the reports in our reporting gallery and now make it available to you to download. Once downloaded you can just double-click on the file and it will launch Excel so you can do whatever filtering and reporting you want with the data
- Link to our new developer documentation for the report data. Don’t want to get the data by downloading CSV files? No problem – you can now programmatically retrieve your report data in either JSON or CSV format. This gives you the ultimate flexibility to incorporate the data into your own programs and processes, build your own custom reporting engine, push the data into a local database, or whatever else you might come up. This is also a great choice for those of you that manage multiple Office365Mon subscriptions.
- Link to a sample application that demonstrates using the Report Data Access REST APIs. It’s a simple C# console application that retrieves data from each of the REST endpoints we have, and also shows the individual data elements available from each.
If you only have one subscription then the page will have a single link for each data source and look something like this:
If you manage multiple subscriptions, then you’ll see two buttons – one to download the CSV just for the current subscription, and another to download the CSV for ALL of your subscriptions. We include the number of subscriptions that you’ll be pulling data down for so you know exactly how big of a request you’re going to be making. It’s our strong suggestion that if you have more than 5 or 10 subscriptions you retrieve the data programmatically, and request it one subscription at a time. Otherwise you may end up having the browser time out trying to retrieve the data. Here’s what it looks like if you have multiple subscriptions:
Other Reporting Enhancements
We’ve added one other feature to a couple of the reports that you see in the Advanced Reports section – Recent Outages and Average Response Time. We’ve added a new “zoom in” capability to it so that when you’re looking at the chart, you have a slider along the bottom of it that you can use to zoom in to a particular point in time. You can slide from either or both directions to zero in on the part of the data set you want to review more closely. Here’s an example of what it looks like, zoomed in a bit from both sides:
We hope these reporting enhancements continue to add even more value to your Office365Mon subscription. We’re not done of course, we’re hard at work on some other features we think you’ll find very interesting and useful. As always though, if there are things you would like to see in the product please email us at support@office365mon.com – your feedback was critical in developing these features so you can be assured that we listen and try to act upon your comments.
On behalf of your Office365Mon crew in sunny Phoenix, AZ,
-Steve
mail: speschka@office365mon.com
follow us on twitter @office365mon
regular updates on our blog
Share-n-Dipity 