SSRS Report Usage Summary

Reports are a little like ice cream flavors; their popularity comes and goes. As a result, you may have many reports in your SSRS catalog which are no longer being used, and without an easy way to identify.

On the flip side, there may be reports which are very popular on your site, but are lagging in terms of run-time performance. Outside of the common complaint “the system is slow”, these problematic reports may simply just be “flying under the radar”, with users resigned to waiting.

To help, there are of course queries that can be run, based on the 3 versions of the database view: [dbo].[ExecutionLog…]. But why not use SSRS itself to hit an ExecutionLog, and more easily surface these analytics? After all, there’s no reason IT can’t use the “BI stack” to help our ‘business’.

To make this easy, I’ve created two .RDLs (Summary and Detail):

A “Go to report” action will open the “Detail report”:

Note that you can specify how long SSRS keeps its log history. The screen below can be found using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), connecting to ‘Reporting Services…’, viewing the ‘server properties’, and then clicking on ‘Logging’:

If you would like a free copy of these .RDLs, just send an email to: info@bitracks.com and place “Report Usage RDLs” in the Subject line.