Jaspersoft Reporting and Analytics for AWS

I explored Jaspersoft  as part of my experience while looking into my current work schedules and was eager to explore new technologies and tools to understand what capabilities they could bring into our current initiatives we were taking on in the projects or maybe the new innovations.

Jaspersoft  is definitely useful for generating customizable reports on your application itself instead of redirecting the users to some other third-party tool. So for generating the reports, it is definitely a very good platform.

This was basically part of my initial self-analysis and exploration that I was conducting. I generated a couple of reports on how frequently the user traffic was coming, some reports regarding the claim success rate, claim rejection rate, and also the count of the users that were landing on a particular page, how much traffic was coming, and how frequently they were shifting to the other or navigating to the other pages inside the applications. I also generated graphical reports as well. If someone is looking for generating lucrative reports that are pixel perfect along with graphs, it is really helpful.

If someone is looking for it, the kind of perfection Jaspersoft is bringing in is a real example and exploration for the end users. The report structure, the look and feel, the scheduling, the deep embedding, and also the precision that it brings to your report really matter a lot. For example, even if we are trying to generate a heat map or a bubble chart or normally a pivot graph, it helped a lot.

There are definitely lots of features. If you just use it and even if you want a playground for data sciences to explore the trends, you might look elsewhere, but Jaspersoft is definitely bringing a good perspective in terms of making a precision report with pixel-perfect quality. Most of the BI tools have flaws with data dynamically, which breaks a strict layout, but Jaspersoft Studio gave us absolute control over the horizontal and the vertical coordinates, the X and Y axis, ensuring the PDF output looked identically similar every time. The deep embedding feature is also valuable. For example, with the real-world explanation and visualizing the D3.js  code that was integrated on Jaspersoft dashboard itself on their SaaS platform, the users never even knew that they were looking at a third-party tool. If you embedded Jaspersoft into your application, it just seems like the reporting is part of your application and you are not navigating to some other external third-party tool. We also use a server to automate the weekly report generation, and in that case, it is really helpful.

Since I explored it as a part of my self-exploration of the different technologies, it brings a lot of positive aspects and bringing the reports on the table with respect to the matrices or the criteria I was looking for, even above the expectations. Though I agree it takes time to get the reports done and needs some hands-on experience on that, but the quality it is bringing and it is not creating any kind of deviation for the user. The end user should not feel that they are navigating to some third-party site or the other platform. It is embedded in your application on its own to have a seamless experience throughout the entire journey.

Every platform has its own way of working and definitely there is always a room for improvement. Jaspersoft is the same. I find that there is a good space on the learning curve, which can be decreased with proper documentation because if someone is a seasoned developer or a seasoned professional, it is easy to have the knowledge and the kind of reports they want to bring with Jaspersoft, but if some new learners or newbies are there, then definitely there is a learning curve on this. Additionally, on the licensing side there is a commercial and the enterprise license. You need to see which one suits you better and should not overpay it unnecessarily if it is not needed. The documentation gap is also there, so I would still recommend that the documentation can be much more emphasized, standardized, and have something specifically about the integration on the coding side, like how you should need to configure the things. That is where the documentation can be enhanced.

I would say maybe on the performance and support size because if you are running it on the server, sometime the UI might or the report may take some time to refresh data or get a delayed response, and that is where things can be improved. If someone is looking for a seamless experience, they can definitely go for Jaspersoft. But if they are looking for a quick building of the report with drag and drop facilities, then there are some other tools for the report generations, quite easily. They can opt for that instead.

For Jaspersoft, scalability is where it definitely shines in. We were working on different multiple reports against a data set over thousands or hundreds of records. By using its JSON data integration, it was easier to get all the data ingestion on the server-side filtering, then the performance remains stable even under the heavy load. It is really good.

As I mentioned, the licensing part is important with the enterprise and the community license. You need to see which one suits you better. Additionally, on the speed side, if you are running it on a server side, you need to see and balance the load accordingly so that the refresh rate should be high and should not have a delayed response. That is another point. One of the more core points would be the documentation gaps. The user interface that can be enhanced because currently Jaspersoft Studio feels like a bit using a tool from an early 2005 or 2010 version. With respect to the newer generation or the current era, the UI needs to be enhanced and the user experience should disrupt the other competitors in the market. That is where the improvement can be done.

I have been in my current field for more than eight plus years.

Scalability is where Jaspersoft definitely shines in. We were working on different multiple reports against a data set over thousands or hundreds of records. By using its JSON data integration, it was easier to get all the data ingestion on the server-side filtering, and then the performance remains stable even under the heavy load.

Customer support is really good on the community side. It just needs the documentation part and then it is good.

I did not switch. It was just a part of additional exploration and we were using Power BI and Tableau as well in multiple projects for the reporting and analysis.

I would not say it is easy to set up because definitely there is a learning curve if someone is going with Jaspersoft because it has the Visual Studio, XML integration. You need to have a good hands-on experience on your Java side and the XML side.

Somewhat, but not significantly. The reason is that it depends on the use case you are working upon. If you have a massive client with a good budget on your side, you can definitely go for Jaspersoft that brings the pixel-perfect in-house application, in-built integration with a seamless experience, that provide a good user experience to the user. Then definitely you can invest and it can increase your ROI. But on the counterpart, if you are looking for something that have much more lucrative UI features on reporting, then you can opt for the other tools as well.

Pricing again depends upon the needs and how you want to go for it. For example, one should definitely check before committing a full enterprise license and leverage Jaspersoft community edition. It shares some of the core engine capabilities as a paid version, allowing someone to test most of your complex report functionalities. If you want to run some kind of JS code or the XML or the SQL queries, you can check it out. Lay out your requirements and your vision or the innovations with upfront cost. Then if you think lesser cost is fine, you can go with the lower version. If you want the enterprise license, then you can definitely look into that.

I would be giving two pieces of advice. For example, if your needs are basically to generate pixel-perfect reporting with the precision on the values and the scaling it is going to bring, you can go for Jaspersoft. If you need deep embedding, if you want to visualize your JS, XML, or Java code with the heavy load of data sets you want to ingest it, you can use the data integration capabilities and the filtering capabilities of Jaspersoft. It will easily get in your data and can generate the reports on different sectors, wide range of reporting as per your needs and requirement. On the counter side, if you are looking for something that basically does not require the investment in time that working with Jaspersoft will definitely going to require, and if you do not have a seasoned developer on that side, you can go with other tools as well, such as Power BI and Tableau that can generate the reports pretty much quickly and give you a flexibility to integrate the third-party tools and then navigate your application over there or design a dashboard separately. My overall rating for this product is 7 out of 10.

My main use case for Jaspersoft  is operational reporting. It's a fixed pixel-based, pixel-perfect reporting solution. For any tabular reporting and canned reports, it's a very good tool to implement. It has a strong web application called Jasper  Report Server which is quite useful in terms of hosting the reports and distributing the reports across different pathways, such as sending it to specific system drives or through users via emails.

At the same time, the very important feature of enterprise editions of domain designs allows end users to have self-empowerment to create reports on their own. This approach reduces about half of IT implementation effort if there is a logical layer in place, so that any ad hoc analysis can be done by users without any technical knowledge.

I can give you a specific example of how I use Jaspersoft  for operational reporting in my bank client. I wanted to understand client positions as of today and what client positions are available for the finance team. What we have done is connect transactional systems data that flows into an operational data store. We connect to that operational data store and have implemented a report requiring all the key attributes which indicates the client portfolio data and the client positions data. We are sharing that with finance, which is used by them for their internal analysis and accordingly, they use that for external submissions in their different formats. This is also one of the key reports that they use for their analysis.

I have something else to add about my main use case for Jaspersoft. We have quite a lot of domains that we have built, which are logical layers, especially on CRM  which is customer data. Also on ODS, which is a very important data set that is our core banking transactional data. There is another important logical layer that I have built called CLIP, and it's more related to client pricing data on how we can charge clients and how it is being charged. Any charges that have happened in the upstream applications, if end users or business side of CLIP want to see the charges instantly and do their analysis, whether it is rightly charged or any incorrect charges levied, or if there is any less charge happened to the client where the bank is losing money. They will get to have instant analytics done using these logical layers and build their own ad hoc views with different fields and parameters in place dynamically. This will give them a clear idea of how the pricing strategies are going on and any changes in pricing strategies to be taken up.

One of the best features Jaspersoft offers is the virtual data source-based reports development, as well as virtual data source-based domain implementation. This has been available for almost more than ten years. I don't think any tool would have such a great functionality of writing a query from multiple data sources, bringing data from multiple data sources, and keeping it into one. Many warehousing tools might have it, but you still need to connect to a single data source for your reporting. However, in Jaspersoft, you can create virtual data sources directly in the server and you can have direct SQL queries on multiple databases and then develop reports. This is one of the very nice features that I see and also in terms of interactive dashboarding, with HTML5 charts compared to the heavy licensing costs of the on-demand tools, this licensing-wise is quite cheaper and the features that it offers are quite good compared to other tools.

I can tell you more about how I use the virtual data source feature. CLIP contains the pricing data, whereas the main RM for a portfolio has a relationship manager who handles that particular portfolio and pricing-related charges for the respective client. All the pricing data comes from CLIP application, whereas all the portfolio RM relation will be coming from a different application called CRM , where we have the customer data as well as the RM data, and the pricing data sits in CLIP. What we have done is create this logical layer with the combination of CRM and CLIP, wherein CLIP business can get to see who is the RM, who is the RM in charge of this particular portfolio and how the pricing strategies are being maintained, how the charges are being maintained can be viewed at a single place using this logical layer with the feature of virtual data sources.

Jaspersoft has positively impacted my organization. For the operations team inside the bank, they do a lot of MIS (Management Information System) reporting on all the transactions happening. One of the specific reports is a transactions payment report where they want to find out how the funds are being transferred, what are the charges made by the bank, and if the charges are happening correctly. All the calculations which are used by our internal teams for their analysis, and then they submit to the regulator based on their analysis on all the transactions related information.

I can share more about the impact. Earlier, when we didn't have Jaspersoft, even in the current world, there are teams, especially even in operations, that are implementing a lot of reports in Excel and doing all the calculations and after that doing their analysis using Excel itself. Once Jaspersoft is used, we have automated their manual activities and saved literally almost everything. Previously, they usually took one and a half weeks to prepare a report for their analysis. Now it takes less than two hours because we have automated everything and they get their report into their hands. They just use the data that we provide for further massaging and finish their analysis. This saves literally one week plus it saves additional time.

Jaspersoft can be improved in several areas. I think this is a very interesting question with feedback for the product teams. Recently it was acquired by HCL, an Indian service-based company. I feel disappointed with the way it is being handled by the respective company that acquired TIBCO Jaspersoft . When TIBCO owned Jaspersoft, it was really good, but after TIBCO acquired it, I feel the marketing strategies or the product implementation roadmap is not up to the way that I have expected. I have personally logged a couple of product defects and very important features as an active user and had to get those features implemented myself.

Documentation certainly requires improvement in terms of setting up Tomcat  and how specific environment-related instructions are provided, including JVM settings or setting up source profiles. If the basics can be included in the documentation, it would be much better. Additionally, some of the core installations are not happening in Jaspersoft from the last two versions, version eight and ten. Considering the default product issues, when you install, some of the default config files are not getting generated properly and we have to manually change the files and make sure the installation is working fine after that, which is supposed to work fine with the product. The documentation has to be improved in terms of any bottlenecks. If any issue comes, there should be guidance on how to fix it as this is part of the core installation.

One important feature I expect is that though the import and export features are given, they are not working for heavy sizing repositories. My current repository is around close to one terabyte plus and we have a great challenge in getting that entire export into one single export. This is not happening. The kind of storage requirements that we have, even if we have increased the storage requirements, the process runs for eight hours, and if any halt in the system occurs, the entire process gets stuck and everything has to be redone. I have raised a product feature to implement a date-based, a date and time-based import and export facilities. That way you can always take some cut of the data for export and import the same cut of the data for import, which gives greater flexibility and immense balance for production rollouts, especially wherein you cannot have an entire production system down and migrate the entire data into the next system. It will always be like one month or two months prior to export all the prod data into a new system. But that will still be two months delta. As there is no provisioning of two months delta to be taken with date time feature as such, we end up doing manual exports from UI for that particular duration, or we need to redo everything back again. This is a great deal of effort that gets invested in doing these import and export activities.

I have been using Jaspersoft for around fifteen years. Even in the current field it's ten years, and in between, I have used a mix of Tableau and Power BI, but Jaspersoft is always continuously on one side.

I would like to add something else about the features. The licensing cost in terms of what it provides is notable, especially in terms of it does provide web services as a data source, but I wouldn't characterize it as a drawback. They have perceived it as an open-source project. I would feel that if they can take this up as a proprietary project under product development, this would certainly give a huge mileage compared to custom Java implementations or custom Python implementations to use REST or SOAP-based web services. This would give more provisioning for many of the users to have web services as a data source in Jaspersoft. Another important functionality or features for migrating one environment to another environment is seamless import-export facilities and the kind of repository management and security in terms of roles and users that are tightly coupled. This gives you a great balance and flexibility to manage all the repository permissions intact. You can have all auditing enabled. Product implementation-wise, everything is good. You have auditing enabled. If anybody is touching the Jaspersoft server application illegally, or without proper access or without proper approval if somebody is trying to change any of the report aspects, that will be captured under audit as part of the Jaspersoft product feature itself where it will have robust security as well that way. Overall, I would rate this review at seven out of ten.

In our organization, the main purpose of Jaspersoft  is for reporting purposes, and that's where we usually schedule and send the reports to the user for their business.

The main thing I appreciate about Jaspersoft  is the ease of creating reports; it's very straightforward. When we need to create custom reports with a query, we can directly go to Jasper  Studio, develop the report, write the query, bring that data, and develop the report in any way we prefer.

The second thing is regarding generating the report from ad-hoc views; it is very straightforward. We just need to drag and drop the columns we need for developing the report, and with that, we can schedule it and generate the report. If we want to develop a custom report using the query, we can develop it easily, and we can format it as we prefer. Generating reports with ad-hoc views is very easy; just drag and drop the columns and apply the necessary filters as defaults whenever the report is executed, which is a very good aspect of Jaspersoft.

I have worked on both generating a report using ad-hoc views and writing a custom query in Jasper  Studio to design and publish it in Jaspersoft. Generating the report from ad-hoc views is the most suitable option for me; it's the best path to take.

The main dislike about Jaspersoft is the latency issue; sometimes when the report is generating, it takes more time than expected based on the report. For example, the project management tool I'm currently working on has the OBS, Organizational Breakdown Structure, and whenever Jaspersoft query fetches this OBS data, it takes more time than we usually expect. The user is somewhat hesitant about this issue; when the report takes so much time, the user gets annoyed. If Jaspersoft could fix the latency issues, it would be a good tool for anyone to work with.

Regarding lagging, whenever we generate reports on large data like OBS data—which is the hierarchy of the organization—Jaspersoft sometimes experiences delays. The latency issue is apparent when pulling this data. Additionally, when developing a report from ad-hoc views in Jaspersoft and specifically when scheduling it, the scheduling doesn't always work as expected. Both the latency and scheduling parts can be challenging in Jaspersoft.

I have four years of experience working with Jaspersoft.

The initial deployment of Jaspersoft is very easy; it is not difficult at all. If you go through the deployment steps we need to follow, it's straightforward with nothing much complicated.

From start to finish, it almost takes one hour. Jasper installation will not take more than fifteen minutes. When the build starts, it should not take more than twelve minutes. Before that, we need to set the Java path and home along with the environmental variables, which takes some time, including installing the installers from the appropriate site, unzipping it, and setting the environment variables. I believe it will take around thirty to fifty minutes to complete the installation. After that, we need to make some changes in the application.properties file, where we incorporate our server details, and this process won't take more than one hour.

One person can do the deployment; it's not a big task and is very easy. The only thing required is awareness of how to get it deployed. Once you understand the steps to deploy, one person can handle Jaspersoft installation alone in the system.

Pricing-wise, I haven't had much chance to see how much budget has been allocated for Jaspersoft, but it's not disclosed to anyone; it's completely managed by the client.

For our organization, we need to take care of Jaspersoft maintenance as well. Google Chrome, the version compatible with Jaspersoft, is vulnerable to threats, so we usually install Google Chrome into Jaspersoft every month. Also, sometimes the Apache Tomcat  version is vulnerable, so during that time we feel the need to install an upgraded Apache Tomcat . Those are the two maintenance tasks we regularly perform. I would rate this product seven out of ten.