Should Reporting for Elastic Stack and Grafana® be so Difficult?

For any Elastic Stack or Grafana® app in production, reporting is a must-have requirement.  You simply can’t go to production without reporting because the first request your users will have is:  Can I get the data as a report?

This makes you wonder, why is reporting not built-in to Elastic stack or Grafana®? Why is it so difficult?  Manually adding reporting to Elastic Stack is not only costly, but also time-consuming. Since time is money, reporting is expensive.   

Scorecard for Skedler Reports for Elastic Stack and Grafana®

From the very beginning in 2015, when we couldn’t find a reporting solution for our Elastic Stack-based app and decided to build one, our goals were simple:

Enterprise Quality: Skedler must be a truly capable enterprise reporting solution for Elastic Stack.

Affordable:  Skedler must be affordable so that organizations big or small can add reporting without breaking the bank.

Easy to Use: Skedler should be quick to install and easy to use.  

Three years after the initial release of Skelder, It is now time to evaluate our performance on these three goals.   

On our first goal, Skedler is now widely used and embedded by organizations of all sizes (See our ever-growing customer list) who consider it as an indispensable component of their production deployment.    We are very fortunate to receive excellent feedback and 90+% renewal rates for Skedler. It’s safe to say we scored an A on this goal.

For our second goal, we created a more affordable option for reporting by offering users flexible plans that allow them to pick and choose which features they want. This is so that users don’t find themselves in a situation where they need to pay for unwanted features. Skedler was made to be more affordable so organizations of all sizes can benefit from automated reports. However, a free edition of Skedler for jumpstarting elastic stack reporting has not been available, so we grade ourselves a B on this goal.  

Finally, on the third goal, there is absolutely no doubt in our mind that we could have done better.  While an experienced Devops engineer can install and configure Skedler within a few minutes, we admit that we didn’t meet our stated goal of making it easy for any user to install and use it within just a few minutes.  Therefore, we deserve just a C on this goal.

But today, we are going to change Skedler for the better with the goal of scoring an A in all the three goals.

Introducing Free Community Edition of Skedler Reports

We are pleased to introduce Skedler Reports v3.8 for Elastic Stack and Grafana® with two new features:

Free Reporting:  Now you can add reporting to Elastic Stack and Grafana® for free.  The community edition allows you to create and schedule two reports free forever. If you need more reports, you can easily upgrade to the paid Standard or Premium Edition and continue to use the same installation while producing more reports.

Rapid Install:  We have eliminated the license activation requirement for Skedler Reports Community Edition.  You can install, configure and start generating reports from Elastic Stack or Grafana® within minutes. 

See release notes for Skedler Reports v3.8.1 here.

Introducing Free Community Edition of Skedler Alerts

Similar to reporting, alerting is a must-have requirement for any Elastic Stack app. We are pleased to introduce Skedler Alerts v3.8 for Elastic Stack with exciting new capabilities that simplify alerting:

Free Alerting:  You can now add alerting to Elastic Stack and create two alerts free forever.  If you need more alerts, you can simply upgrade to the paid Standard Edition and continue to use the same installation.

Rapid Install:  We have eliminated the license activation requirements for Skedler Alerts Community Edition.  You can just install and start alerting from Elastic Stack within minutes. 

See release notes for Skedler Alerts v3.8.1 here.

Download Community Edition Reports and Alerts

Start using free reporting and alerting for Elastic Stack and Grafana® in minutes with Skedler Community Edition.  Download now and use it for free!

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