Custom Report Application Installation Count Changes

[JayOyster]

I'm trying to create a custom report that will show me per-device installs of all applications. Yes, it's going to be a huge data set, but I was planning on splitting it up using custom filters to show application titles by section of the alphabet (Titles starting with A or B, titles starting with C or D, etc.)

I exported very large data sets and then start running my analysis in Excel. Only after working on this data set for awhile did I realize that it wasn't reporting all installations. As a check, I wanted to simply see all machines where FlexNet Inventory Agent is installed. The count is known, it's 23,500 devices. When creating the custom report, I pick Installations > Installed Devices, and when I filter to just show FlexNet Inventory Agent, I get 23,500 devices. But if I remove the FlexNet Agent filter, and instead filter by applications between F and G, I only get about 1100 devices showing with the FlexNet Inventory Agent.

I've tried all kinds of variations on building the custom report, but any time I get both the application list and the device names, I'm only seeing 1,100 devices with the FlexNet Inventory agent, while I know we have 23,500 instances out there.

What's going on here?

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

It could be that despite your filtering in the report definition, the number of rows returned by the report is still too large and so the data returned is getting truncated. I think the default limit is to return no more than 1,000,000 rows of data, so if the filtering in the report definition returns 2,000,000 rows then you will only see 50% of the data you expect.

While the limit of the number of rows is 1,000,000, in general I would recommend configuring reports so no more than a few hundred thousand rows are returned.

[ChrisG]

Here is another active thread about a similar topic: Custom report data limit

[JayOyster]

When I publish a report that has all titles, but then when I run it I add a filter so that I have no more than 100,000 lines, is it still going to truncate some of the data?  Because that's what I'm seeing. If so, will it work if I put the filter into the report before I publish it?   (Say, only show Application installs where the Application name starts with 'F'.) Let me check. . . 

OK, I tried that, and for only 'F' titles, I got a count of about 315,000 rows, and it does include all of the expected copies of Flexnet Inventory Agent.  So a post hoc filter won't work to reduce the line count to a managable number. You have to publish the report to have fewer than a million rows. If it has more, it will still generate the output, but it will truncate the data in unpredictable ways, and it won't tell you that the filtered data set isn't complete. 

OK, I'll accept that solution.  It's a bit messy, but it seems to work.

[ChrisG]

Yup, you've got it!

You may also be interested in the License Compliance > Applications > Application Installation Details built in report. This report allows a user to select a publisher and (optionally) a set of applications and list the associated installations: