The System Center product provides you with the best IT systems management and reporting capabilities. The various components of this product continue to provide great value in all areas of management and monitoring. Each of the components has one or more data storing repositories. These data repositories hold valuable strategic information that can assist an organization in transforming its IT business unit into a strategic enabler.
The database (repository) technology of the System Center product is Microsoft SQL Server. There is a vast array of information on the Internet on how to query and report on Microsoft SQL databases. The skill set required for the level of querying and reporting on these databases is normally aligned to Database Administrators (DBAs) and Business Intelligence (BI) specialists. The DBAs and BI specialists use various tools to create business-valued reports based on the data stored in these Microsoft SQL databases.
The challenge DBAs and BI experts face with System Center reporting is a lack of insight into how the data is structured, and more importantly, a lack of deeper understanding of the products responsible for the input data. Conversely, in the majority of cases, the System Center product's Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) do not have the same level of competency as the DBAs and BI experts in creating and enhancing reports.
The aim of this book is to enhance the competency of System Center SMEs in the areas of reporting. There are a number of books on querying Microsoft SQL databases and generating business-value reports. However, those books do not focus on System Center. Also, all the books on System Center's components dedicate a reporting chapter to that specific component of the book's focus.
Microsoft System Center Reporting Cookbook, provides a one-stop shop for how to plan, create, and manage reports for all the components of the System Center product.
This book is written in the Packt Publishing style, which provides you with independent, task-oriented steps to achieve specific reporting objectives. We recommend that you read the first three chapters as primers for subsequent chapters. This book may be read in the order of your interest, but wherever relevant, we've referred to the dependent recipes in other chapters.
Chapter 1, Understanding the Goals of Reporting, discusses the building blocks of your reporting framework and how to plan for business-valued reports.
Chapter 2, Planning System Center Report Design, covers the internals of System Center reporting database structures, which you must understand in order to create credible and powerful reports. This chapter also includes an introductory recipe to SQL queries.
Chapter 3, Unpacking System Center Report Building Tools, discusses the common report-creating tools available for System Center administrators and Business Intelligence power users.
Chapter 4, Creating Reports for System Center Configuration Manager, provides tasks for System Center administrators, who can create System Center Configuration Manager reports using the Report Builder tool.
Chapter 5, Creating Reports for SCOM and SCVMM, demonstrates how to create System Center Operations and Data Protection Manager reports, with data available from the Operations Manager databases.
Chapter 6, Creating Reports for System Center Data Protection Manager, shows you how to create data-driven reports for System Center Data Protection Manager.
Chapter 7, Creating Reports for System Center Service Manager and Orchestrator, illustrates how to create service management and automation activity reports using data from System Center Service Manager and Orchestrator.
Chapter 8, Creating System Center Advanced Reports, shows you recipes that build on and enhance the reports from previous recipes in this book. These recipes delve into advanced reporting techniques and combined data source reporting.
Chapter 9, Using Power BI to Analyze and Visualize System Center Data, introduces the Power Business Intelligence (Power BI) options available for you from Microsoft. These recipes provide steps for analyzing and visualizing the System Center data using the Microsoft Excel Power BI add-ons, and introduce the cloud Power BI versions available for you.
Appendix, Useful Websites, Chapter Code, and Community Contributions, lists some of the sites that provide ready-made solutions and extensive, real-world, and dynamic content on reporting. Microsoft SQL Server-based reporting, similar to most Microsoft product areas, has an extended solutions partner community. There is an extensive and active support base on the Web. This appendix also provides you with the SQL and XML code referred to in the relevant chapters.
In order to complete all the recipes in this book, you will need access to environments configured with the relevant System Center component (or components). Here is a list of technologies the recipes depend on and their relevant versions used for this book:
Microsoft Active Directory (Windows Server 2008 R2 and above)
System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1/R2
System Center 2012 Operations Manager SP1/R2
System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager SP1/R2
System Center 2012 Service Manager SP1/R2
System Center 2012 Orchestrator SP1/R2
System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager SP1/R2
Microsoft Report Builder 3.0
The required software and deployment guides of System Center 2012 can be found on the official Microsoft website, at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/default.aspx.
We recommend using the online Microsoft resource due to the frequency of updates to the products' supported requirements. Also note that the dynamic nature of the Internet may require you to search for updated links listed in this book.
This book is for IT professionals who are responsible for producing reports using the data from System Center components. Basic knowledge of Microsoft System Center technologies is assumed.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You have the option to configure two additional databases known as OMDataMart and CMDataMart."
A block of code is set as follows:
SELECT fnRS.Name0 As [Computer Name], fnC.Name As [Collection Name] FROM fn_rbac_FullCollectionMembership (@UserSIDs) fnFCM JOIN fn_rbac_R_System (@UserSIDs) fnRS ON fnFCM.ResourceID = fnRS.ResourceID
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Under Report Data, right-click on the dataset called List_Collections."
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