Appendix B: Best Practice Guidelines for Historical Report Performance

This section presents a list of best practice guidelines for running, exporting, and designing historical reports. By following these guidelines, you will be working towards minimising and eliminating performance issues at report runtime.

Running and Exporting Reports

• (All users) If you are a large organisation with heavy communications traffic, run your historical reports over short periods. For example, if your organisation contains over 10,000 agents, then run an agent report (for example, a standard agent report) for periods in the order of a few days. If your organisation contains, say 100 agents, the report may be run over a much longer period.
• (Administrators only) Limit the number of reports that you include in a scheduled export.

Designing Reports

Administrators only

The following guidelines apply to custom reports only.

• Limit the number of dimensions in a report to as few as possible. If you want to create a custom report containing metrics that are broken down by lots of dimensions, consider creating multiple copies of the report, each with the same metrics but with a subset of the required dimensions. 
• When designing a report that will break a metric down by date and time dimensions, limit the number of the following continuous dimensions as they can potentially generate lots of rows, particularly if the report contains other dimensions.

30 Minute Periods (Continuous)

15 Minute Periods (Continuous)

• Limit the number of complex reports that you place on a dashboard. A complex report is one containing lots of metrics, dimensions, or both. If you have lots of complex reports, create more dashboards and then distribute the reports among them.