If you use the Auditor in Business Objects XI Release 2, you will very likely need to create custom versions of the canned reports to provide metrics that are useful to your specific organization.

One of the primary concerns for a client was the monitoring of report run times. Given the timeout limits that are imposed on reports, if they run too long they will fail. We needed to have report stats monitored and sent out each morning after the heavy processing of the scheduled reports was completed.

As our reports run early morning, I wanted to set the report period to be 6AM yesterday to 6AM today.

In our environment our heavy hitting reports are all Web Intelligence reports so we wanted to limit reporting to Web Intelligence and not all jobs (as the default BO report provide).

Since the BO reports are canned, they of course do have to be generic. But reports that are too generic are often less useful for a specific application.

I set the report to run daily at 7:00AM. Since it reports on 6AM to 6AM it will capture the scheduled report processing which is complete by 6AM.

Our environment is BusinessObjects XI Release 2 on Linux.

I looked through the canned reports that came with XI. It turns out that there weren't any canned reports that shipped with auditor that reported in a form that was useful in our environment.

I made a couple of simple mods to the "Activity" universe (which is what the auditor package runs off of). And I created a custom report for our environment.

The Activity universe is the universe that comes with auditor and which all the canned reports are based off of. It's part of the standard install. The table structure and the universe is not very comlex, and can be understood with a little bit of digging through it.

I set the report to show any report failures at the top of the report, and I've set an alerter to make the entry red and bold. After failures (if any) it will sort by duration in descending order so we can see the longest running reports on top.

I set up the report to mail an excel format file.

That way, if anyone wants to sort or manipulate the data further, it will be easier.

Unfortunately when BO outputs to Excel it is next to impossible to control where BusinessObjects merges the Excel cells (vertically and horizontally). This can make it difficult to sort in excel without doing some column copy-paste-delete-editing stuff. Excel won't sort cells of uneven widths (merged and not). I tried to get "unmerged" cells in excel… which is usually an exercise in futility… and it was in this case.

Here's the major high level mods I made to set up the custom report. You will likely need to do something at least a little different.

Expanded information on this example can be found at this: Business Objects XI auditor for XI R2 site.

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