External (Directory) Reports

External reports are available for Job objects only. They are stored on the Agents and not in the Automation Engine database and require some configuration.

When defining Jobs you can specify whether the external reports should be saved to the database or remain on the Agent. No matter where you decide to store them, with just a few configuration steps you can always access them.

This page includes the following:

Registering External Files

From an Automation Engine perspective, these files are external reports, so the first step is to register them as such. This way, you make the Automation Engine aware of their existence. Open the Output Pagesof the relevant Job object, and enter the path and name of the output files for this purpose. You can also register them using the :REGISTER_OUTPUTFILE script element.

In the case of PeopleSoft jobs, you must configure the job to transfer the reports to the Automation Engine. To do so, activate the Register Output Files option in the Job definition. See Transferring Output Files to the Automation Engine.

Transferring External Files

Once registered, these files are available and accessible from the Automic Web Interface. To display them, they are transferred via File Transfer objects. This behavior has the following implications:

The file size is decisive for the time if takes to transfer the files. This is why large files are split in smaller chunks and displayed in pages you can scroll through.
Users can only open the files if they have the necessary authorization to access both the job and the external reports for the particular file and for the agent.
The registered output files are retrieved by the agent; therefore, they must be accessible to the agent. If the agent cannot find the files, or if they cannot be accessed, an error is thrown.

Where You Find them

You can now open the external Job output files as any other report from the Reports window by selecting Directory from the dropdown list.

The basic information on the report is available at a glance on the Directory list:

The name of the report as indicated on the Job object Output page
The type of report
Whether it is saved on the agent or in the Automation Engine database, according to the settings on defined on the object-specific page.
Whether entering login information is required to be able to download the report. This depends on the job object configuration on the Attributes Page.

Downloading External Reports

You download external reports from the Reports window. You have two oprions:

Click the download icon
Right-click on the report and select Partial Download

It might be necessary to enter login information. This depends on the job object configuration on the Attributes Page.

The download starts immediately. In case of reports that exceed 10MB, before downloading them the systems prompts you to confirm whether you want to download the whole report, or only a user-defined number of lines, either the first or last ones.