As an IT pro, at any moment you or a member of your team — including your boss — may need to know what sessions and entries were accessed, along with when, for how long, and by whom. That’s where RDM’s built-in reporting comes to the rescue and saves the day.
In a moment, we’ll look at a great new report type in RDM 13 called Check Out. First, let’s look at the four main report categories: General, Expired, Logs and Security (which is where the new Check Out type is found).
General Category
The General category generates reports on (you guessed it!) general information. One report in particular that is very useful is the Duplicate Entrylist. Don’t you hate it when you find two entries with the same name and wonder “Is it a duplicate, or are they different?” The Duplicate Entry list allows you to compare entries with the same name, so that you can quickly confirm if any actual differences exist. Problem solved!
Expired
The Expired category generates reports (such as a handy calendar report) about sessions and entries that have an expiration date. You can even create a report that lists expired warranties that are linked to an entry
Logs
The Logs category features reports about session usage logs. In seconds, you can see the login date for a session, the user, which machine was accessed, the duration, and more. It’s ideal for when you need to create an audit trail.
Security (and the new Check Out)
The Security category generates reports about password usage, password complexity and permission settings for users and entries. Here is also where you’ll find a great new report type to see what entries have been “checked out” by other users.
What do I mean by “checked out”? It’s tied to a new feature in RDM 13 called (appropriately enough!) Check Out. It lets users lock an entry while they’re accessing it, so that others can’t override their login and disconnect them.
With the new check out report, you’ll see all of the checked-out entries — and therefore won’t waste your valuable time trying to access any of them. Or if you urgently need to access an entry that is locked, the check out report will tell you who currently has the keys to the (virtual) door, and you can tell them to let you in ASAP.
So there you go, folks! I hope this little recap of all of the report categories in RDM — and the special look at the new check out report — has been helpful. Oh and don't forget that you can use command line to execute and export your reports to make your life even easier!
As always, please let us know your thoughts by using the comment feature of the blog. You can also visit our forums to get help and submit feature requests, you can find them here.