This report is great for a high-level overview in terms of who is making downloads, when they’re doing it and in what quantity, but it does not cover exactly what report it is that is downloaded.

This data does exist in the Usage project; it simply needs to be surfaced into a report and this requires only a small amount of effort in TBM Studio. First, a little context.
 

Searching for ‘Exports’ in the Project Explorer will return the following tables:

The three tables ‘Excel Export’, ‘PDF Export’ and ‘Tableau Export’ all have source data automatically fed into them which the user cannot directly access or control. Following a small amount of transformation these tables append into ‘Exports’, along with API read data. It is the above ‘Exports’ object on which the ‘Report Downloads’ report is based.

This explanation will focus on Excel Exports, but the principle and steps can be applied to other download types.

 
1. Create Transform Table

Following general Apptio best practise guidance, it is not advised to customise OOTB reports or master data sets. In this case it best to treat these export tables as master data sets. Therefore, the first step is to create a transform of the ‘Excel Exports’ table where the transformation can be done.

In this example the name ‘Excel Export TL’ was used but you can use your preferred naming convention.

 
2. Transformation Steps

The following transformation steps are recommended.

Filter

It is expected that you will mostly be interested in report downloads made by users outside of the TBMO and therefore from the Production environment. With this in mind it will be worth filtering by the ‘Env’ (Environment) column, retaining only rows equalling ‘Production’.

Formulas

The ‘Report Path’ column contains the relevant information that must be examined to extract the report name and there are only two simple formulae required to do this. The report path is a concatenation of fields that forms the data path of the report, much as you would expect with all reports in TBM Studio, where a forward slash (/) is used as a separator.

This string between the 6^th and 7^th ‘/’ needs to be split from the Report Path as this contains the report name we’re looking for.

Report Name Split            =split(Report Path,6,”/”)

Next, this new column needs further splitting to strip it down to only the report name itself.

Report Name                     =mid(Report Name Split,7,len(Report Name Split))

These two formulae mean the data can be evaluated and summarised as below.

Of course, doing this work won’t impact the OOTB reports, and continuing with Apptio best practise it is advised not to alter them. To surface this information in a report is a choice for the user, but having taken the above steps you will have the data ready in an easy-to-use to format to report on who is exporting what table, when and in what quantities.

A suggestion on how to expose this data is to create a report with a similar format to the OOTB ‘Report Downloads’ report and to simply add in an additional field called ‘Report Name’.