One of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007’s most powerful functions is its reporting functionality. Operations Manager reports are built on a data warehouse that’s designed to gather raw data. Over time, this raw data is aggregated and only the aggregated data is retained for historical reports. This approach allows Operations Manager to store data for a long period of time without increasing the size of the data warehouse to such a level that reports take too long to run. Operations Manager uses SQL Server to store the data and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to provide the reporting functionality. Operations Manager provides the necessary framework for an extremely powerful reporting feature, including the ability to provide long-term historical trending reports.
Although Operations Manager’s reporting structure is extremely powerful and flexible, it’s also unintuitive and can be difficult to work with. This article provides 10 tips to help you make the most out of your Operations
Manager reporting environment. These tips focus on the following areas:
- Running reports in Operations Manager
- Finding reports for Operations Manager
- Generating your own reports in Operations Manager
- Report integration in Operations Manager
Running Reports
The most common complaint about Operations Manager reporting is how difficult it is to identify what object you need to run a report on. Running reports in Operations Manager isn’t as simple as selecting objects from the screen and then running the report. It isn’t uncommon to open a report, select what appears to be the appropriate object, run the report, and get a blank report. For example, you can’t select a group of servers and run a free disk space report on them. If you’re frustrated with getting blank Operations Manager reports, see the first five tips for information about how to find valid objects when running reports.
For an explanation of why a report is blank, we need to look at how Operations Manager functions. It uses an approach that takes different entities, referred to as objects, and defines a model for each object’s heath. (For a full introduction to Operations Manager, see “Operations Manager Key Performance Indicators.”) Examples of Operations Manager objects include servers, processors, disks, and distributed applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server. Objects exist in a hierarchy such that a disk object is part of a server object. The objects can each have a defined health state, and they each have data that’s used for reporting, as long as the performance counter is associated to the object. For example, if you choose a drive on a server as an object, you won’t have a processor performance counter associated with it. If, however, you choose a computer object and the objects in it, you’ll be able to see a processor performance counter.
Tip #1: Filter Options. In the original Operations Manager 2007 release, finding the correct object to choose for a report is often extremely difficult because the list of objects isn’t restricted to objects that actually have data for the report. To select the appropriate object, you need to filter through all the available objects to find the correct one that has the data needed for the report. If you select the incorrect object and run a report, it will return no data. To address this issue, Microsoft added the Filter Options search feature in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Several of Operations Manager 2007 R2’s new reports are designed to show pre-filtered objects that have data for the report. If you click Search, you can see the objects that contain data for the report. Figure 1 shows a report in which a single SQL Server database engine was returned. This search option doesn’t exist for all reports—only reports that were rewritten in Operations Manager 2007 R2 to include the Filter Options feature.
Figure 1: Using the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Filter Options feature
To find reports in which the Filter Options feature is available, open the Reporting pane in the Operations Manager console and open a folder with reports. Open the report, then add an object. If the filter options are available for the report, you’ll see the Filter Options have been applied message, as in Figure 1. A good example of Filter Options is available in the SQL Server Management Pack, in the user activity report.
The Service Level Tracking Summary report doesn’t show the Filter Options, but when objects are added (shown as Service Levels), only acceptable objects (objects that have data for the report) are returned by the search. In my environment, I configured Service Level Tracking for the Operations Manager distributed application based on better than 99-percent availability. I also created my own line of business (LOB) application called LOB01 and configured Service Level Tracking based on better than 98-percent availability. If I add an object to the report, the Operations Manager distributed application and my LOB01 application will be listed for this report.