Basics:Reports

From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki

5.1

Reports are a good way to measure productivity in the Helpdesk, many of the different statistics corresponding to how quickly your workers respond to tickets is captured and showcased in a variety of formats. Because of that most reports are ticket-based, which means you won't find dedicated reports for tracking obscure information. Something like Time Spent completing Tasks for an Organization is not going to be a standard report. Let's get you up to speed on where to find reports first.

• Look for a main menu link called 'reports'.

• If it's not there, you need to enable the plugin (helpdesk setup, Plugins & Features).

• There are 19 standard reports in 5.1 if you have Time Tracking enabled (also in helpdesk setup, Plugins & Features), otherwise the last three reports are removed for a total of 16. To make sure you get the full report experience make sure you have Reports and Time Tracking enabled.

"Closed Tickets by Group over Date Range" (highlighted) is the one we're going to focus on.

• Because reports have a lot of private statistics on your organization's output, it may be something you want to hide from your employees. Reports is one of several features in the Helpdesk that can be completely removed (dropping the whole reports page) or partially hidden (erasing specific reports) for each worker's login with proper permissions.

Uncheck individual report groups you want to hide; uncheck the parent permission '[Cerb5] Reports' to completely remove the 'reports' page (main menu link up top will be gone).

Closed Ticket by Group

The best way to explain reports is to show you one that has a little big of everything in it; the Closed Tickets by Group report is a good example we can use the rest of the way. Click 'Closed Tickets by Group over Date Range' to get started. The following is a full picture of the entire report start to finish, after the giant image we'll go over each major section one by one. I apologize that this document is so screenshot heavy but it should help explain things with minimal surrounding text.

Screens are based off a local test Helpdesk and uses sample data within a very short period of time (days instead of months), just enough hopefully to prove a point. Ideally you’ll get much more “interesting” results on your production Helpdesk.

Filters (Groups)

Unlike previous versions, the reports do not automatically reload when you make changes to the dates or filters. Make sure you click ‘Run Report’ as needed.

Hopefully the idea is intuitive enough that it doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation, but the cool thing to notice is how you can choose what things you want to filter by and show in your report. If you only want to compare three of your groups, four of your workers, six organizations, you can do so.

In the “closed tickets” report we have a group filter (by default all groups are part of the chart, even though the group filter initially appears empty); other reports might include a worker or organization filter where applicable. To customize your filters, click the + button.

In this report we get a “group chooser” to make our selections with, but choosers are all over the Helpdesk for when you need to select something out of a list. Simply select which groups you want to INCLUDE in the report, save changes, and the new additions should appear. Click the ‘Run Report’ button to refresh the page (if you want to remove a group from the filter, click the little blue trash icon next to each group and click ‘Run Report’ a second time).

Trends & New Charts (Graphs)

This is the biggie since it’s so eye catching. Reports include incremental progress in the form of a timeline on the x-axis, meaning you can track trends over time.

Bar graphs are now vertical to accommodate.

In prior versions it was harder, if not impossible, to monitor any gains or drop-offs in work throughput over significant periods; with the new system it’s very easy to tell if say, we resolved more tickets around this time of year last year than this year. At the top, to the right of the date range, there is a ‘grouping’ dropdown to narrow or expand the timeline into days, months, or years.

NEW CHARTS

We’ve also added five new charts to experiment with -- the “stacked” variants layer the data to give you a better sense of proportions.

• Line

• Line (Filled)

• Line (Stacked)

• Bar

• Bar (Stacked)

Hover your mouse over a colored area and you’ll get a tooltip showing the group.

Worklists

Consistency is the keyword here. 5.1 reports utilize the same type of worklists you’ve been seeing everywhere else in the Helpdesk for years. You get all the perks of lists, things like (peek), action buttons (close, spam), bulk update, ‘customize’ views, “copy” to workspace, and 'export'.

Table Breakdowns

The last feature is a set of tables at the bottom of the page. These tables are basically text descriptions of what you see in the charts themselves. In the “closed tickets” report, we show the dates and the number of tickets closed that day -- if you grouped by months or years you’d see that comparison instead. We also include a grand total (sum) and an average (mean).