SSRS Overview

Overview

Click a Reporting Services catalog database in the tree and you get this page: four panels about the report server rather than about the database’s tables and indexes.

The four SSRS overview panels for a report server database
Catalog use, twenty four hours of activity, the busiest accounts, and the spread of durations.

Each panel is a way into the report behind it. Nothing here is decoration over a grid; the panels are how the reader gets to the page they want.

Where to find it

Expand a server in the tree and click a database that holds a Reporting Services catalog, normally called ReportServer. The page is drawn only for such a database and for no other.

Detection asks whether dbo.ExecutionLog and dbo.Catalog both exist in the database, and the answer is cached for the session.

The four panels

Report catalog

How much of this report server is actually being used.

The large number is how many reports the catalog holds. The arc is the share of them that have run at all inside the execution log’s retention window, and the four bars beside it are how many ran in the last day, week, month and quarter.

A report server where two thirds of the catalog has not run in ninety days is the single most useful thing this page can tell you, and it is a fact about the denominator rather than about any one of the counts.

Clicking the panel opens SSRS Report Speed.

Reports run, last 24 hours

Twenty four hourly columns. Each one is split into the runs that were a subscription firing on a schedule and the runs that were a person, with failures marked above the column rather than hidden inside it.

A report server whose entire overnight window is one subscription account looks completely different from one being used at three in the morning, and both used to be drawn identically.

Clicking the panel opens SSRS Reports Run.

Busiest accounts

The five accounts with the most runs over the last seven days, each bar split into subscription and interactive runs. An account whose every run was a subscription is a schedule rather than a person, and the panel draws and names it as one.

Clicking the panel opens SSRS Report Users.

Reports by average duration

The five duration bands, drawn proportionally so the width carries the count: under a second, one to ten seconds, ten to sixty seconds, one to ten minutes, and over ten minutes.

Clicking a band opens SSRS Report Speed filtered to that band.

What changed

The panels themselves are the same four. What they draw is not.

  • The catalog panel showed five numbers in five grey boxes. Four of those were the same measurement at four resolutions, and the fifth – the size of the catalog – was a denominator that nothing divided by. The arc uses it as one.
  • The hourly panel drew twenty four identical columns with no idea what kind of load they held.
  • The accounts panel drew five plain bars, so a subscription service account sat at the top of a list of people with nothing to say it was not one.
  • The duration panel gave a band holding one report exactly as much of the screen as a band holding twenty six. Worse, clicking a band forwarded the count rather than the band’s name, so the page it opened ignored the filter and showed everything. Both are fixed.

Requirements

  • A Reporting Services catalog database.
  • SELECT on dbo.ExecutionLog and dbo.Catalog.

The four panels query the original dbo.ExecutionLog view rather than probing for ExecutionLog3. The overview draws all four the moment a database is clicked, and four extra round trips in front of the page would cost more than the two friendlier column names they would buy. The detail reports, which the reader chose to open, do the probe.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I not see these panels on my report server database? The database has to contain both dbo.ExecutionLog and dbo.Catalog. ReportServerTempDB holds neither, so it shows the ordinary database overview.

The catalog arc says 20%. Is that bad? It is worth investigating rather than worth fixing on its own. Reports that have not run in the retention window are candidates for retirement, but a quarterly report on a server keeping sixty days of log will always look dormant.