A report that lives inside GLPI is a report no one reads. Decisions don't happen in dashboards — they happen in inboxes, Teams channels, and Monday morning standups. The hard part of "data-driven IT management" is not building the report. It's getting the report to the person who needs to see it, at the moment they're making the decision, in a format they can act on. GLPI has several mechanisms for this; pick the one that matches your audience.
Built-in scheduled reports for managers
GLPI's native scheduled-action engine can run a saved search on a schedule and email the result as a CSV attachment. Open Setup > Automatic actions, find reports (or create a new one), and configure: frequency, recipient, attached saved search. The recipient does not need to log into GLPI — they get an email every Monday at 06:00 with last week's ticket counts attached. For a service-desk manager who lives in Outlook, that's enough.
Limitation: built-in scheduled reports send raw data. The Excel file lands in the inbox, the manager opens it, sees rows, draws their own conclusions. Good for technical recipients who want the data. Bad for executives who expect a number, a trend, and a caption.
Reports plugin for formatted PDFs
The legacy reports plugin (still maintained, still in wide use) generates pre-formatted PDF reports with charts and explanatory text. You define a template once — title, filters, chart types, layout — and the plugin renders it on demand or on schedule. Email the PDF to the leadership team monthly. They get a document that looks like a deliverable, not a CSV that looks like homework.
This is the right delivery format for: monthly board summaries, quarterly SLA compliance reports, annual asset inventory reports for finance.
Dashboard URLs for live access
For audiences who want to look at numbers when curiosity strikes, not when an email lands — usually team leads checking on their own queue — share a direct dashboard URL. GLPI 10+ dashboards have stable URLs. Make a dashboard scoped to a single team or entity, set it as the team lead's profile default landing page (Setup > Profiles), or paste the URL into the team's wiki / Teams channel description. They click once and see live data.
If your audience won't log into GLPI, the dashboard URL approach fails. Fall back to scheduled email or PDF.
Webhooks for chat-channel delivery
Recent GLPI versions ship webhook support. Configure a webhook target pointing at a Teams or Slack incoming-webhook URL, and trigger it from rules — for example, post to the #service-desk channel whenever an SLA breach occurs, or post a daily summary at 17:00 with open-ticket counts by priority.
For high-engagement audiences (the service desk itself, an oncall team) this beats email — the data shows up where the conversation already lives. For low-engagement audiences (executives) it's noise; stay with monthly PDFs.
Match delivery to decision cadence
The hardest decision is not the report content, it's the schedule. Match cadence to the decision being made:
- Daily — operational dashboards for team leads. What's the queue look like today, did anything breach overnight?
- Weekly — capacity and trend signals. Ticket count vs last week, agents over/under load, categories spiking.
- Monthly — SLA compliance, KPI vs target. Decisions about staffing, process changes, vendor performance.
- Quarterly — strategic. Asset refresh planning, budget conversations, ITIL maturity assessment.
A daily email to an executive is a daily delete. A monthly chat post to operators is unread. Each cadence has one ideal audience and channel. Get them right and reporting transforms from "we have data" to "we use data."