Emailing a Report

In Events > Scheduled Tasks, you can create a recurring task to email a report to defined users.  First, you will need to create a "Saved Report".

Go to Reporting >Generate Report, to create a saved report.

There are six report types. These each has their own set of parameters. For example, for a Login Report, we can select a time period. For Ranges, you can put in a Date from and a Date to. You can also leave either or both blank to indicate from the beginning and until the end respectively. If you do select a date, it’s a fixed date and will never change. The other option is to select a Search back; for those you can specify the number of hours, days, weeks, months, or years and all report generation actions will run from that relative time until now.

The other parameters in the Login Report allow you to focus on a particular user, specify how the report should be ordered and limit the number of results. These can generally be left at their defaults.

Clicking Generate Report will create a report using the parameters you selected. If you’re happy with the report, you can click the “Save This Query” button in the top right or switch back to the Generate Report tab and click “Save Report”. Either way, you’ll come to the Save Report dialog where you provide a description of this report.

Once you’ve saved a report, the Saved Reports dropdown will list reports ordered by Type and then by description as shown below in the ‘Saved Reports dropdown’ screenshot. You can then select a report and click Load Report to recall all the parameters you specified. From there you can quickly regenerate the report by clicking the Generate Report button.

You can also Load an existing report, change parameters and then save it again. If you don’t change the description, the saved report is updated, otherwise, a new version is saved.

Finally, if you’re done with a saved report, just select it in the dropdown and click Delete Report; you’ll be prompted to confirm if you really want to permanently remove this Saved Report.

Emailing a Report

Once you have a Saved Report, you can schedule to run and email that report. In Event Manager > Scheduled Tasks, create a new Scheduled Rule. Once you’ve entered a name, you can set a schedule by setting the Start Date and frequency. Finally, create a new Action. Selecting “Email Saved Report” will allow you to select the email server, saved report, to whom it should be sent, as well an optional subject line. An example is shown below in the ‘Email Saved Report Scheduled Task’ screenshot.

Email Caveats

Email clients are notoriously finicky about what type of HTML they will display. We have tested reports with a number of the most common email clients, but there are too many to test all of them and there is no one solution that works exactly the same way everywhere.

Generally speaking, email clients don’t appreciate long emails. So if you’re running a report without a limit or using an authentication source with thousands of users, you’re probably going to have issues viewing the email. Depending on the email client, the email may be very slow to render or will clip the content.

For Outlook, HTML emails are rendered using the Word engine and support very limited CSS customization. Considerable effort has been invested in making reports look good in Outlook, but Outlook may still automatically insert links.

Currently, Gmail has a hard limit of 102kB that the web client will display; after that, you get a message saying “[Message clipped] View entire message.” However, at the current time, the entire message view gets all CSS stripped out of it. We’re continuing to work on this issue, but we’re not entirely sure there is a solution for large reports without some updates by Google to the Gmail web client.