Reporting overview

In Chapter 9, Visualizing Your IT with Dashboards we discussed how to present real-time data back to the business through the use of dashboards. These are all well and good for the here-and-now picture but what if you need to show historical information about the health or performance of your environment? This is where the Reporting feature of OpsMgr stands out.

Built on Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) platform, this feature can be both fantastic and frustrating – depending on what you're trying to achieve with it! Some of the benefits OpsMgr reporting brings to the table are things like historical trending of health and performance, detailed information about configuration, capacity planning assistance and the ability to deliver monitoring and SLA information to people outside of the IT team.

With potentially hundreds of pre-built reports to choose from (depending on the management packs that you've deployed), you can be up and running in no time with...