By: Kyle Wassink, Blue Medora
IT reporting is a common requirement in organizations, from simple one page overviews to comprehensive analysis and forecasting. Depending on how you create these reports, it can be a time consuming task that can be simplified. That’s where vRealize Operations can help with scheduled reports.
Creating a Report
The first step in creating a report for vROps is identifying exactly what needs to be included. Is the report for a single resource like a mission critical Nimble Pool or UCS Blade? Or is it for a multiple layers of the stack, from the Oracle Database down into the NetApp Volume for example. What information about the resource(s) do you care about? Do you want to display the information in a table, graph, or pie chart? Once defined, you need to create views.
Figure 1: A sample Distribution View that could be added to a vROps report.
Reports in vROps are created using something called “views”. Views are self-contained definitions for how to display pieces of information. For example, you could have a view that defines a list of metrics to be displayed for a NetApp Volume in table format with a summary row. To learn how to create views, visit the vROps Views blog series. Once you have identified the information you want in your report and created the necessary views, you are ready to create the report. Navigate to Content > Reports and click the green “+” icon to begin.
Figure 2: In Content > Reports, click the green “+” icon to create a new report.
Step one is providing a name, and optionally, a description. Once entered, click on the next step. In step two, drag and drop your desired Views from the list on the left to the middle section. If you did your planning and view creation, this should be quick easy! Steps three and four are optional, so we will skip them here for the sake of simplicity. Save your report.
Figure 3: Step one and two of creating a report.
Save Time by Scheduling Delivery
At this point you have a report ready to run, now you just need to automate it. First things first, manually run your report and ensure it turns out as expected. Second, ensure you have outbound settings defined in the Administration > Outbound Settings if you want to send the report to you (or anyone else). Next, find the report in Content > Reports, click on the “gear” dropdown and select “Schedule report…”.
Figure 4: You can schedule reports in the Content > Reports page by clicking “Schedule report…” in the dropdown menu.
In the schedule report popup, the first step is to define what resource the report will run against. Once selected, click “Next”. The “Define Schedule” step has two parts: defining the actual schedule and optionally defining the publish settings. In the top section, define the schedule you want the report to run on. This includes the time zone, time of day, start date, and a recurrence schedule.
Figure 5: Sample scheduled report settings.
If you want to send the report to yourself, management, or anyone else, move on to the bottom section and check “Email report”. Here you can provide the email address(es) where the report will be sent whenever it runs. In the “Select and outbound rule” dropdown, find and select your preferred mail setting which were configured in the Outbound Settings described earlier.
Enjoy the Automation
You’ve successfully created and automated your weekly report! No more scrambling on the weekend to put it together for the Monday meeting or remembering to email it out to the team. Repeat the process for other reports to save even more time, or download a trial of any solution from Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite for vRealize to customize reports from within a management pack.
