Things to Consider When Configuring Operations and Security Reports in SCOM 2007 R2
The following are best practices when configuring operations and security report in OpsMgr 2007 R2:
► Use scheduled reports to automatically distribute operational reports to administrators, application owners, managers, and executives.
► Use the scheduled Windows file share distribution to post reports to directories that link to web pages. Use the Overwrite option to have the web pages update automatically.
► Always generate reports in the format and time period ad hoc first, and then schedule the report. This ensures that the reports are targeted at the correct objects, return the appropriate data, and are formatted as expected.
► Locate objects in the Monitoring space of the Operations Console, and then select the reports to generate from there. This ensures that the correct objects and reports are matched, as the reports will only show in the user interface if they work with those objects.
► Use SQL Server Reporting Services to produce custom ACS reports using OpsMgr’s Reporting feature.
► Duplicate the existing ACS reports with custom reports to be able to schedule the reports with relative dates.
► Schedule the OpsMgr Maintenance reports for weekly delivery to easily monitor the health and performance of Operations Manager.
► Leverage the reporting database to store and report on data over a long period.
► When tuning, use the Most Common Alerts report to see which alerts are the most valuable targets for tuning.
► Use Service Level Dashboards instead of the Operations Console or Web console as a way of presenting Operations Manager data to a wider audience without impacting the performance of the alerting.
► Change the Service Level Dashboard default aggregation to Daily to prevent undue load being placed on the data warehouse.
This posting is 1 of a monthlong series of postings on the Microsoft System Center family of products. This is an excerpt from my book “System Center Enterprise Unleashed” with more postings on the System Center family of products up at http://www.networkworld.com/community/morimoto
