Reporting Overview

Reporting is accessible from the Submissions Perspective, and then selecting the Home Icon, which will bring you to the Metaserver Submission Console.

This area of the Metaserver is divided into 3 sections, each one is explained in detail from the links below.

Metaserver has an integrated reporting engine, allowing reports to be run across submission records in the Submission Warehouse Database as well as Channel device, revenue, drop-list and league information. A number of pre-built reports are included and are accessible from several access points in the Submission Perspective, depending on the scope of the data they report across.

The reporting system is extensible and based on Jasper Reports. New reports may be requested from Metaflow, or developed and deployed in-house. For more information on custom-built reports, please contact your Metaflow support representative or System Administrator.

Report Execution

Reports can be run as real time (report executes immediately) or scheduled (report is run on a recurring basis). A real time report may still take several minutes to run. When a real-time report job is triggered, the report executes in the background on the server, leaving you free to continue browsing, or to queue up further reports for execution.

If you elect to run a report as Scheduled, you will be prompted to provide any input parameters for the report and then asked whether you would like the report to be run daily, weekly or monthly. The user is then asked to specify a time for the report to be generated and a list of recipients to be emailed with a copy of the report once it has executed.

Filters

Many reports will require input parameters in order to run across the desired data. These are collected using dialogs called Filters. Filters typically require the user to select things such as channels, projects, plans, devices or date-ranges. Some filters require the user to select a single item, whereas others are multi-select. Multi-select filters do not require you to hold down shift or ctrl on the keyboard to select several items – simply click an item to select it and click the same item again if you wish to deselect (selections hold until cancelled in this way).

When reports have executed, they appear in My Reports. (GREG- please add link to My Reports section).

Important information regarding channel data

Metaserver reports have access to a copy of device, revenue, league and drop-list data for all channels available in the client. Due to the large volume of data involved, your Metaserver retains a local copy of this channel data to improve reporting performance. This data is not updated in real-time. By default, a fresh copy of all channel data is copied to your database on nightly basis (once every 24 hours). As such, channel data in Metaserver reports could be a maximum of 24 hours behind the channel data on the Metaflow live database. i.e. If the Metaflow operations team has imported a new channel device list, you should expect to see this reflected in your reporting approximately 24 hours later.

The process by which your local channel data is refreshed is known as a Normalizer Extract Job. It is possible to start this process by selecting Options-Normalizer-Trigger Extract Job from the main menu. Please be aware that this is an asynchronous process and will take a variable amount of time to complete. Metaflow believes that the trade-off between a 24hour delay on data and access to high-performance reporting is worth it and we would discourage the user from repeatedly triggering extract jobs to see the very latest data. In our view, far more advantage will be conferred if the publisher implements a solid reporting process that sees key reports generated and reviewed on a recurring scheduled basis (using the in-built scheduler engine), such that trends are analysed and projects are pro-actively managed, reducing the need for reactive reporting at the last minute.

Types of Report

Metaserver reports fall into these broad categories, providing different scopes, and are available at different access points within the Submission Perspective.