The importance of reports in our Terminal Services Log software can hardly be questioned. I mean, the whole application and usage scenarios we’ve heard about are all about reporting and monitoring. Two most important report categories are:
- Alerting & Monitoring – for example: If the system detects intrusions on your system, you will receive an email and be able to react straight away to solve the problem.
- Data Reporting – most usage scenarios fit into this category. It is with all cases when your primary goal is to collect and analyze data. The couple of examples monitor server usage, application usage, licenses, employee time tracking…
Naturally, you can analyze the data both in the Terminal Services Log itself, or export it and analyze it using third party applications, mostly Microsoft Office Excel. In this post we will focus on Data Reporting - how to analyze data using third party applications.
What we had before – static datasheet reports
If you wanted to collect and analyze data with earlier Terminal Services Log versions (2.x), you had an option to export every report to CSV or PDF. Obviously, PDFs could serve as the “read and show-only” reports while CSV (Comma Separated Values) files could be opened by Excel or any other software and analyzed your way, put into your calculations, connect with other documents etc.
Once made, those analysis were static, so each time you wanted to “refresh” your custom built reports in Excel, you had to export the data again to CSV file and repeat the complete procedure of building custom Excel (or other) reports. We have received many feature suggestions that claimed dynamic reporting should be implemented within the product, so the data in reports is updated automatically.
Dynamic Worksheets are now available!
To make the reports dynamic in version 3.0 and fulfill customers’ expectations, we have implemented the de facto standard for dynamics reporting – Microsoft Office Excel Dynamic worksheets and Dynamic PivotTables.
Let’s take a look of how it’s done. Choose any report in Terminal Services Log and click on the Excel export button in the main menu. The following window will appear:
Obviously, exporting to both Static and Dynamic Worksheet will look the same in Excel at first glance. The difference lies in the Excel Data menu:
By clicking the Refresh button, when the file is exported as Dynamic Worksheet or Dynamic PivotTable all of your data will be automatically updated with the most current results from the Terminal Services Log. You can also explore the Connection settings which enable you to use dynamic data in Excel as well as in your custom built applications (or third party applications).
Dynamic PivotTables make reports even more flexible
In the Excel export described above, there is also an option export report to Excel Dynamic PivotTable. Dynamic Worksheets enable automatic data updating and PivotTable takes you a step further. The main purpose of PivotTables in general is summarizing and analyzing data in easily readable format. Is there a more obvious need than summarizing tons of data you have about your server into more logical and understandable structure?
Here is the example of Application Usage History Report. It contains a huge amount of data. But if you export it as a Dynamics Pivot Table, just by dragging 2 items into Pivot Table field list, you will get a simple and comprehensive report showing how many minutes each application has been used for:
Click here to download trial version of Terminal Services Log 3.0.
