Galaxy Reports App

[guerler]

Galaxy Reports App is currently broken, carries a large amount of legacy code, and is, in its current state, useless. We need a discussion on whether to remove it and then reintroduce functionality gradually as needed within a new Reports section in the Admin panel or to rewrite/migrate it in some other form.

[hrhotz]

just a piece of information from my site: For our production server (which is built on 21.05), I heavily rely on the Reports server more or less on a daily basis. I mostly use it for:

• to get a quick and general overview how busy the server is (and how many jobs are failing) and to check for unfinished jobs
• to check whether my cron jobs have triggered any file uploads to the Data Libraries
• to help the user to figure out what went wrong (i.e. getting Job Information by Job Id). Most of the time, this is quicker than using the impersonate option
• to find out whether there are new users (and which tools they have been using so far). So I can add them to the relevant mailing lists.

for other, more complicated queries, I have a set of SQL calls, which I adapt and use to directly interact with the PostgreSQL database.

So, if one day, the Reports server doesn't work for me anymore, I will need to write more (and better) SQL calls.....but so far, the Reports server is just handy for me.

I will bring up the topic at this week's Small Scale Admin meeting (https://galaxyproject.org/events/2025-10-small-scale/)

Hans-Rudolf

[guerler]

Thank you @hrhotz, that’s helpful context. Based on what you described, the key features you rely on are:

• Quick overview of server activity and job failures
• Checking whether cron jobs triggered file uploads to Data Libraries
• Accessing job information by Job ID to help users troubleshoot
• Identifying new users and which tools they are using

Would having these features exposed elsewhere, for example in the Admin panel, make the Reports app obsolete? Feel free to add any other features that come to mind.

[martenson]

If I remember correctly the only thing needed to make reports work is to add this to your nginx configuration.

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

I agree it does not work "out of the box", but if you put proxy in front of it (as we teach in admin materials), it works fine (xref galaxyproject/training-material#5652)

[guerler]

Thanks @martenson. I tried the suggested nginx headers, but that did not resolve the issues I saw. Regardless, I think the Reports app has become obsolete. It is no longer being extended or maintained, and the underlying technology is outdated. Pretty much nothing else in Galaxy uses makos, relies so heavily on controller endpoints, or depends on the legacy grids with jQuery and Backbone. This code path is isolated and aging. We should come up with a good replacement, either by moving the essential functionality into the Admin panel or by providing access through gxadmin queries and Grafana. It is unfortunate, but it has reached a point where maintaining it as is no longer makes sense. Having said this, I’d be happy to help with whichever path we decide to take.

[guerler]

Closed with #21076