How to create a Report | v8.1+

Last updated 5 November, 20255 min read

The reporting in Certero has always been powerful, with data grid filtering and Dynamic Group queries. With Certero V 8.1+, the new Reports menu is where you’ll build and save powerful, custom reports. You can:

Access properties not available on data grids
Customise which columns are included in the report (add/remove/rename/re-order)
Report on properties of data types related to the base data type
Build filter logic using a powerful, intuitive, graphical Filter Builder
Save reports as templates for re-use and customisation, so that you don’t have to re-create column selections or reinvent complex logic
Export large amounts of data (within reason)
Report on one-to-many relationships; for example you could have a report showing all software titles installed on all computers (multiple rows for each individual computer)

Report Management

Unless you’re an Admin , you will not see options to delete other users’ reports or to create & manage templates.

Report Details

Choosing an existing report from the main Reports screen (above) will bring you to the Report Details screen for that report. The report will run, and the results are displayed. This screen is also where you come to edit existing reports.

Report Edit Mode

Report Construction: Data Type & Template

We’ll demonstrate the features of Edit mode by creating an example report to show AD group memberships for active users in the Engineering & Sales departments , also showing the manager of both the AD users and the AD groups.

First, we’ll choose AD Users as the base data type of the report. This can’t be changed later.

Then we choose a template. A template is pre-defined collection of columns and filters suitable for use as the base report of a specific reporting task. The templates seen in this step are specific to the data type you chose before.

Certero (system) templates are built in. User-defined templates are created by Certero users from existing reports. For this exercise, we’ll use the default template.

Columns

When we choose columns, we’ll only see those that make sense for the base data type and its related data types. These (following image) are our column selections for our report exercise. They’ll be numbered according to the selection sequence, and this is the order in which the columns will appear in the report. We can re-order columns later.

Note in the image above that multiple columns share the same name, i.e., name & manager . We’ll deal with this later.

IMPORTANT : column selection is much more than simply choosing which columns to display. It governs which additional, related data types are processed & filtered in the report and can therefore impact the uniqueness of the resulting records and dictate the size and usefulness of the report.

Filter Builder Overview

Before we build our report filters using the Filter Builder , here’s an overview of how it works.

Note that the Exclude slider seen above takes the non-matching results instead of the matching results. Filter logic, of course, can’t directly find conditions that don’t exist (e.g., you can detect software that’s not installed) so you may need to use criteria that matches conditions that are the opposite of what you want and then use the Exclude slider.

Note the Saved Filter option (above) will be rarely used because you can save complex report logic for re-use using report templates instead. Saved Filters are described in the Certero Governance Policy guide, found here .

Conditions

Back to our example report. Adding our first Condition , we’re only interested in active users.

Group

Because we need different and/or logic for our computer department filtering, we create a Group and populate it with the required conditions.

Column Order & Names

Our report is complete however we’ve noticed some system groups are listed which we’re not interested in. We filter them out with more top-level conditions.

If we were interested in users in any department (based on AD OU) except Engineering and Sales, we’d set the Group-level Include/Exclude slider to Exclude .

Report Constraints

Reports with over 500,000 records are too large to export. You’ll see an orange banner at the bottom of the screen and the Export button will be deactivated. You’ll need to refine/filter your report to reduce the record count.

The powerful nature of Reports means that it’s possible to create reports with many hundreds of millions of records that exceed the system capability. A red banner will indicate this condition, and the paging controls will become unavailable.

Note that Certero has a built-in API which you can use for large and/or complex reporting use cases, and which doesn't have these constraints, although there are system performance considerations. To learn how to get started with the API, search the help guides for the key words API and Power BI .

IMPORTANT : beware of adding columns for things which do not all relate to each other. You’ll need to make considered column inclusion decisions instead of just piling them into your report. For example (below) software titles relate to computers, and services relate to computers, but services do not relate to software titles; so, the report is forced to create a unique record for each service for every software title on every computer. This results in a huge, noisy report that exceeds capability. Here’s the noisy report where you can see multiple rows of Office 2016 on the same computer, all broken out for every service, which is silly: