Introduction

Historically opReports has relied solely on being run on demand via the GUI (deprecated in opReports 4.3.1) or command line (or periodically with cron). In version 3.0 we've added another feature that extends these capabilities: the opReports Scheduler. The scheduler is meant to act a bit like a combination of "cron" and "at" (a venerable but not especially well known Unix tool, companion of cron)  for opReports.

The basic idea is that you control the scheduler by defining opReports "jobs" to be taken care of (once, at a particular time in the future, or recurring with specific frequencies and start/end times/dates).

How to define Report Schedules

In the GUI

As of version 3.0.2 using the GUI schedule editor is the most convenient method for managing report schedules. The GUI schedule editor is a front-end that handles schedule files, so the  technical details given in the next section remain applicable.

Version 3.14 Traffic Snapshot Report can be defined in the Gui. When this report type is selected you can add and delete snapshot pages under (Sources)

Using Schedule Files

For ease of automated deployment and scriptability opReports provides access to all job schedule options using schedule files.

Each scheduled job is defined by a separate JSON file. The scheduler expects these files in /usr/local/omk/conf/schedule (but this is configurable - see <omk_schedule> in conf/opCommon.nmis).

All job files must be called <something>.json, and only letters, digits, dot, underscore and hyphen are allowed in the file name. All other files are silently ignored. You can thus disable a job by naming it something like !disabled_job.json. opReports ships with a number of example schedule files (all set to be inactive) and a brief README file in the conf/schedule directory.

A job file must consist of one "hash" datastructure, with the following properties:

Besides these user-definable properties, the scheduler also manages certain others for internal use, and you should not modify these! (Currently these include the properties "uuid", "in_progress", "completed" and all properties named "actual_<something>".)

Scheduler Operation

When the scheduler starts it looks for jobs that are in need of actions (ie. the wanted reporting period has just passed and the relevant report hasn't been created yet) and handles them sequentially. When the scheduled job is finished, the job file is not removed and remains behind (regardless of whether this is a one-off or recurring schedule). After that all known saved reports are checked for pruning: if the report was created with a non-zero keep_for property, and is older than this cutoff then it is removed. This affects only report instances, not the job schedules.

The opReports scheduler is not a long-lived daemon process, but  rather meant to be run suitably frequently from cron. The scheduler does log to opReports.log, but also prints error messages of higher urgency to STDERR, where cron will pick them up and mail them to root (or whatever recipient you have set up). By default opReports creates an /etc/cron.d/opreports which triggers the scheduler once every 5 minutes for recurring reports and every minute for one-off reports.

Recurring Schedules

Recurring jobs are processed repeatedly, as soon as the scheduler determines that the end of the report period for that schedule is past.

One-Off Reports ( One-Off Reports are generated using the Create one-off Report button in opReports 4.3.1 and newer )

A one-off job is normally processed  exactly once, as soon as the report period has passed. The job is then marked completed and will not be (re)generated.

It is, however, possible to generate another instance of a one-off schedule:

• This can be desirable if your one-off uses relative start and end times (e.g. 'now - 10 days' to 'midnight').
• The scheduler does not attempt to guess that your one-off report may be rerun safely;
  it needs to be told to reconsider the schedule. This is achieved by clearing the completed flag in the report schedule.
• If you work on the schedule files directly, simply remove the completed property and save the modified file.
• In the GUI, simply open the respective schedule for editing and hit the Save button; this also clears the completed property.

Remote-Controlling NMIS

This experimental feature is primarily meant for Interface Utilisation Reports at this time and works only for one-off jobs. If your job has control_nmis true AND a node_intf_list file, then the following actions are taken:

• When the job starts, NMIS is reconfigured with global_collect true and with ONLY the wanted nodes and interfaces (identified by the node_intf_list file) set to collect true. All other interface collection activity is disabled with global_nocollect_ifDescr. An nmis.pl type=update run  will then be performed, and the NMIS data collection commences as normal.
• When the job  completes, NMIS is disabled, with global_collect set to false.
• This clearly interferes with recurring schedules and should therefore only be used in isolation.

As of version 3.0.2 some limitations apply for this feature:

• The NMIS remote control feature is not supported for recurring report schedules, only for one-off reports.
• The only possible extra action to take at the beginning of a job is enabling NMIS and setting the listed interfaces and nodes for collection.

Optional Settings

The options property can hold sub-properties that fine-tune opReports' behavior. There are a few common options that are shared by all reports:

• Option title lets you specify a custom title for the report. The value must be a string.
• Option homelink lets you specify a custom banner, to be displayed only for a standalone HTML report and above the actual report (title and body).
  The value of this option must be a string that contains the raw HTML to be shown.
• Option email lets you specify one or more recipients for report delivery by email. The value must be a comma separated list of email addresses. opReports will email the report to all listed email addresses, with all selected output formats as attachments.
• Option node_naming lets you change how node names are displayed.
  If not set (the default), nodes are displayed with their plain node name.
  If set to display_name, the NMIS property display_name will be used if it's present for a node; if not, the plain node name is used.
  This is supported in opReports 3.0.8 and NMIS 8.6 onward.
• Option interface_naming lets you change how interface names are displayed.
  If not set or set to the default value Description, the interface's Description property is used (in NMIS that corresponds to the ifDescr or ifAlias property).
  If set to a different interface property name, that property's value is used.
  This is supported in opReports 3.0.10 and NMIS 8.6 onward.

The Node Availability and Interface Capacity reports support option embedgraphs (value true or false), which controls whether graphs are embedded into the graph. The Report Descriptions page describes this feature in more detail.

The WAN report supports option wan_report_level, whose value selects which report detail level should be chosen. This can be given either as the index of the  level or as its name. The page about WAN report detail levels describes this feature in detail.

The Node Health report has option exceptions, which when set to true, changes the report to only display health exceptions and suppress nodes with ok health values.

The Utilisation report recognizes the following four options:

The Traffic Snapshot report recognizes the following two global options, and numerous report-specific settings.

Report-Specific Settings

For Traffic Snapshot reports, please check the Traffic Snapshot Report detail page.

Output File Naming

We recommend that you let opReports manage output files completely, and that you make use of the automatic report emailing feature or the Zip button in the GUI to access report instance files.
If that is not feasible for you, the following description of of how opReports generates file names  may come handy.

Please do note that the behaviour of all naming options except "simple" may change between opReports versions.

1. The file name auto-generation logic only affects the basename of the file; extensions are always set to .json for the report metadata file and .html, .csv  and .xlsx for  the different output formats.
2. Please note that any graph files associated with a report are not subject to this naming scheme; those names are completely dynamic and can be determined only by analysing the report metadata file.
3. On-demand reports generated from the GUI allow the user to supply the 'report name', and if that is present then it'll be used for the file names (but subject to de-clashing as outlined below).
   If no report name is supplied, then On-demand reports are treated like scheduled non-recurring/one-off reports.
4. All file names may be amended with a number if a clashing file already exists, e.g. "some_report.3.xlsx" and "some_report.4.xlsx" may be generated.
5. All file names are adjusted to replace certain characters: all spaces and ":" are replaced by "_".
6. Depending on the report frequency, the following components are used to build the file name: