Automating ISIS Report Generation

Isis provides a standard tool to allow the automatic generation of reports on a regular basis. The tool is called IsisReportGen.exe and it can can be found under the directory in which the Isis package was installed.

To use the IsisReportGen.exe we would suggest configuring a Scheduled Task on the machine which is running the Isis console. This scheduled task should run the IsisReportGen.exe on a regular basis passing the parameters below to indicate what report should be generated and how regularly this should happen.

IsisReportGen is particularly useful for the HTML health check reports. We would suggest that if you are interested in using the health check report to provide a view on the health of your system, then you should configure its generation on a regular basis (such as every 5 minutes), using the scheduled tasks to do this. For more information on setting up scheduled tasks on your machine, please see the Windows documentation.

Parameters for IsisReportGen.exe should be passed with a -report=txrpt style format.

IsisReportGen.exe takes the following parameters;

-report

The name of the report that you wish to generate, if you do not pass a report parameter, but pass the -app parameter below, the IsisReportGen will return the list of valid reports for this application.

   
-site The name of the site that you wish to generate this report for, if you do not pass a site parameter, then Isis will generate the report for all the sites defined for this report. If you pass a site name which is invalid then IsisReportGen will return a list of valid sites for the application.
   
-start

The start time for the report, ie. when generating the report, what should be the starting date and time for the data that we use to generate the report.

The -start parameter should be provided in the following format (although the date function is fairly clever, we should suggest sticking to the format below)

DD/MMM/YYYY H:MM:SS AM/PM

For example;

-start="26/MAY/2004 9:30:00 AM"

   
-end

The end time for the report, ie. When generating the report, what should be the end date and time for the data that we use to generate the report.

The -end parameter should be provided in the following format (although the date function is fairly clever, we should suggest sticking to the format below)

DD/MMM/YYYY H:MM:SS AM/PM

For example;

-end="26/MAY/2004 10:00:00 AM"

   
-previous Alternatively rather than providing dates for the generation of the report, you can provide a relative date, that will generate a report from the previous time specified to the current time. This function is useful if you want to generate a report for the last 30 minutes for example. The previous parameter is a unit and the type of unit is passed in the interval parameter below. For example if you wanted to generate a report for the last hour, then the previous parameter would be set to 1 and the interval parameter would be set to h for hour.
   
-interval

Defines the interval for the previous parameter passed in above, valid values for this parameter are d for day, h for hour or n (not m) for minute. For example;

Generate a report for the last 10 minutes: -previous=10 -interval=n
Generate a report for the last 8 hours: -previous=8 -interval=h
Generate a report for the last 24 hours: -previous=24 -interval=h
or -previous=1 -interval=d

   
-format What format do you want the report to be generated in, valid values are excel and html. Please note that not all reports are available in all formats. If you pass the report format in as a parameter IsisReportGen will tell you what report formats are available for this report.
   
-app Which application do you wish to generate this report for. If no application is passed in, then Isis will provide you with a list of valid applications that you can report against.
   
-out Which directory do you wish to place the result of the report generation in. Please note that HTML reports are always generated under the /report directory of their data inventory, regardless of what value is provided here.
   
-log The IsisReportGen tool will generate a log of all of its operations. If required you can specify the location of this log file with the -log parameter.