Subscribe to Dashboards and Reports
Overview
You can now automatically subscribe to receive selected dashboards and reports via email, improving visibility, transparency, and operational efficiency for both Service Desk and Service Catalog users.
The subscription experience is based on the familiar Send Report via Email functionality, but starts with a new, user-friendly Subscription Wizard. Reports are attached to emails in configurable formats (PDF, PNG, JPG). You can subscribe for yourself or others (if permitted), with a clear overview and management of your active subscriptions.
Each user sees only the reports to which they are subscribed and can manage or delete their own subscriptions, with centralised subscription management for Administrators.
Key capabilities:
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Flexible cadence: Weekly, Bi-Weekly, or Monthly with a daily engine activation that triggers actual sending.
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Configurable content: Layout options (portrait/landscape), file type, color theme, include header/footer, enhanced color contrast.
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Prevent duplicate subscriptions: The system prevents duplicate subscriptions for the same target recipient.
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Monitoring: New Report Subscriptions dashboard for Administrators provides full visibility into usage, subscription volume, and generation limits.
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Report generation limits can be configured by Administrators in the Global System Settings: Report Subscription area. By default, 100 reports per day are allowed for On-Premise installations. Be mindful of server performance.
Subscriptions list and new subscription configuration wizard
Administrations get a new Report Subscriptions overview dashboard, showing:
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Report generation volume & limits
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Sending by days & recurrences
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Subscriptions by report, application, creator, file type
Administrators can view, edit, and delete subscriptions centrally.
Prereqisites
- Enterprise Service Management v.12.1.3 or higher
- New Look design
- E-mailing is enabled and configured
Configuration
The system administrator can configure the following options in the Global System Settings: Report Subscription area:
Default E-mail descriptor
Defines the e-mail template that will be used for generating and sending emails created as a result of the Subscribe action to dashboards or reports. By default, the Default Report Subscription Template is used.
Default browser
By default, the Alternative Browser Path to Use for Report Creation field is empty.
The application server requires a browser for processing subscriptions and sending e-mails. The system checks standard paths, and if no browser is found, it shows an error in the system diagnostics. In case the error occurs, the administrator can provide an alternative path to the browser on the application server in the field, for instance:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe
Limits configuration
The Subscribed Report Limit (per day) option is configurable only for on-premise installations. By default is set to 100 and can be extended by the system administrator. Extending this limit may require scaling the infrastructure to handle increased server load.
For cloud installations, this field is not shown, although the default number of available subscriptions per day is also 100. To increase the number, an additional M42ReportEmailSubscription license certificate is required.
Despite the installation type, reaching the limits can be monitored on the Report Subscriptions page and, when reached, identified by the System Diagnostics.
Subscribe action in Dashboards and Reports
The Subscribe action allows users to share access to reports or dashboards based on their own view of the data. Since data visibility is often personalized, depending on user roles and permissions for widgets, each user may see a different subset of the information. As a result, the same dashboard or report may appear differently to another user, or it might not be available to them at all. When you subscribe someone else, they receive the report or dashboard as it appears to you, within the limits of their own access rights. This ensures that shared insights reflect the current user's view while respecting individual data permissions.
By default, the Subscribe action is available to the following user roles:
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Service Catalog Management
- Service Desk Management
- Service Request Management
- Ticket Management
- Administrator
A restriction was introduced to help control subscription limits and prevent system overload. By default, only 100 subscriptions per day can be processed. This limit can be adjusted by an administrator or, in cloud environments, may require an additional license certificate to increase the allowed number of subscriptions. See also, Limits configuration.
Creating a new Subscription
To subscribe yourself or someone else, open the necessary Dashboard or Report and in the actions panel, click Subscribe:
Subscribe action on dashboards or reports
Configure the following options:
- Cadence: specify the recurrence for sending the report
- Weekly (default) and specify the day of the week, by default it's set to Monday
- Bi-weekly sends the report once every two weeks on the specified day of the week during odd or even weeks, with the hint telling if the current week is even or odd:
- Monthly and choose from the following options:
- on the first day of the month
- on 15th
- the last day of the month
- Choose file type:
- .PDF (default)
- .PNG: high-quality image with no loss in detail or clarity, has a larger file size compared to JPG file format
- .JPG: good quality image that has a smaller file size compared to .PNG file format
- Include footer and header:
- Yes (default): the header of the downloaded file includes the logo and the page name, and the footer contains the name of the user and the current date. The content of the footer and header depends on the selected in the Global System Settings template and can be redefined by the Administrator. See also, Print Header/Footer property in the General section of the Global System Settings.
- No: the described above content of the header and footer is not present in the file, only the content of the dashboard or report is added to the attached file.
- Page orientation:
- Portrait (default): the page is oriented vertically, and the height is longer than the width.
- Landscape: the page is oriented horizontally, and the width is longer than the height.
- Theme: choose from the suggested themes (light, dark, or other if more themes were activated for your system). The current theme selected in your profile is selected by default.
- Enhance Color Contrast:
- Yes: the file content is attached in Enhanced Color Contrast mode.
- No (default): the content has the colors from the selected in the subscription preview theme.
Subscription configuration options: attached file properties
Click Send Details to proceed with the recipients configuration.
- Choose the recipient type and specify the recipients:
- All users: select from the users available in the system. You can subscribe yourself and add other users, as many as necessary
- Roles: choose from the available in the system role(s) to send the report to all users of this role
- E-mails: allows adding e-mail addresses that are not registered in the system. Type e-mail address and click enter, as as many addresses as necessary
- Subject: the e-mail subject
- Message: optional message that will be added to the e-mail body
- Signature: optional signature that will be added at the end of the e-mail
You may find the sent e-mail example with configured subject, message, and signature in the Subscriptions processing section.
Subscription configuration options: recipients and additional message
Click Finish to save the Subscription.
Subscription configuration: successfully created subscription
The new Subscription is added to the list of my subscriptions.
Limitations
A user can only be subscribed once to the same report. If you try to create another subscription for the same user, or for instance, there is a subscription created for a user Role, and the current user is in this Role, regardless of the selected cadence or delivery day, an error message appears:
The recipient 'user_name' is already subscribed to this report. Please manually unsubscribe them before attempting to create a new subscription.
Managing subscriptions
My subscriptions
To view all your subscriptions, click the Subscribe action on a dashboard or report:
The section lists all available subscriptions from all applications where the current user is an owner (creator) or is mentioned in the list of recipients.
Subscription types
The list includes subscriptions you created (where you're listed as the owner) as well as those created by others who assigned you as a recipient for the dashboard or report:
- Self-subscription: you created the subscription yourself and you are listed both as owner (creator) and user (recipient) of the subscription.
- Assigned subscriptions: another user created the subscription and added you as a recipient. You will still receive the reports based on the defined schedule, but you cannot delete these subscriptions, add other users, but you can unsubscribe. Only the subscription owner can delete the subscription.
Actions
Unsubscribe: the action is available if you are in the list of users when were subscribed to the dashboard or report. If you are the only user in the subscription, when you unsubscribe the record is deleted from the system. After you unsubscribed, it is not possible to subscribe again and only an Administrator can add you to the recipients list of existing subscriptions or a new subscription should be created if you were the only mentioned user.-
Delete: only the owner of the subscription can delete it.
Additionally, the system Administrator can edit the cadence, recipients, or delete the subscription for other users.
All Subscriptions
All subscriptions in the system are available for the Administrator and can be previewed and managed on the Report Subscriptions area of the Administration application.
Subscriptions processing
The subscriptions are processed once every night with the Process Report Subscriptions engine activation. The system takes into account the configured daily limits and processes the subscriptions according to the configured cadence and recipients. As a result, each recipients receives an e-mail with the relevant attachment, according to the subscrption.
The standard e-mail template can also have additionally filled out information, that will be displayed in the sent e-mail as follows:
- Subject
- Message
- Signature
Monitoring and editing Cadence
The system Administrator can monitor and adjust some of the subscription's properties (cadence and user list) in the Report Subscriptions area of the Administration application.
Troubleshooting
The following issues related to the Subscriptions processing can be identified by the system diagnostics:
- Verify report generation limit for the next days: the message is shown when, in one of the upcoming days, the system detects that the allowed limit of the subscriptions that can be processed in one day is exceeded. The dates when the limit was reached are specified in the error details. An Administrator should consider rescheduling the existing subscriptions to other days via the Report Subscriptions page or changing the limits of subscription processing via Global System Settings (for on-premise installations) or by adding an additional license certificate.
- Verify browser for report generation: no browser is found on the server. Consider setting a path to the browser in the Alternative Browser Path to Use for Report Creation field of the Global System Settings.
