How to Review Report Performance

Using certain standard reports and the report analyzer helps you identify reports that run slowly, or not at all, and determine the cause.

Reports that are configured to examine large amounts of data may be problematic. These reports might use too few filters, include a large number of tables, or might be running on an excessively large database.

Running Large Reports

While you want to avoid running reports that examine large amounts of data, it may occasionally be necessary to do so to meet your business needs. In such cases, you have several options.

• Run the report on the report database instead of the operational database so the report can query more data. See Overview of Report Databases.
• Queue the report to run at a later time. See Overview of Queuing Reports.
• If the report includes multiple output levels, you may be able to use report linking to reduce the number of tables and rows queried by the report. See Overview of Linked Reports.

Identifying Report Run Failures

You can view reports that fail to run and the types of failures they encounter using two standard reports available in the Reports explorer in Public Reports/Common/Site Administration/Reports.

• Report Failure Details—This report lists reports that failed to run, and how often they failed, during a specified date range. The reasons the reports failed to run are also listed. Reasons include Too Much Data, Timed Out, and Unexpected Error. You can drill down on the rows in this report to view more specific information about each failure.
• Summary of Report Failures—This report lists the types of report failures along with the number of times the failure was encountered during a specified date range. You can drill down on the rows in the report to access information in the Report Failure Details report.

Tip: To create custom reports that display or filter on the success of report generation, you can use the Result Code (result_code) field in the Analytics Audit Log (ac_audit_log) table.