Chapter 3. Reports
Click the Reports accordion under → to see a list of reports available. These reports have been constructed to help you view the most commonly requested and significant data. From here, you can also create reports if you have appropriate access. Red Hat CloudForms provides a large group of default reports organized into categories. Each category has its own set of subfolders.
- Use Configuration Management to see hardware, application, network, service, user account, operating system, and snapshot information for all of your items.
- Use Migration Readiness to see information specifically related to items required to migrate a virtual machine.
- Use Operations to look at free space on registered and unregistered virtual machines, to see power states for virtual machines, and see which offline virtual machines have snapshots or have never been analyzed. You are also provided with reports specifically related to the operation of Red Hat CloudForms, such as user ids and snapshots taken by Red Hat CloudForms.
- Use VM Sprawl to check on usage information and disk waste.
- Use Relationships to see virtual machine, folder, and cluster relationships.
- Use Events to view operations and configuration management events.
- Use Performance by Asset Type to see a report on the performance of your virtual infrastructure. You must be capturing capacity and utilization data to get this information.
- Use Running Processes to view the information on processes running on a virtual machine. You must have domain credentials entered for the zone to collect the info for these reports, and the virtual machine must have been analyzed at least once.
- Trending shows projections of datastore capacity and host CPU and memory use.
- Tenants: quotas report aggregated by each tenant that shows quota name, total quota, in use, allocated, and available. The report currently lists all tenants and there is no nesting information available by parent and child tenants.
- Provisioning shows provisioning activity based on the approver, datastore, requester, and virtual machine.
For a complete list of reportable fields in Red Hat CloudForms, see Appendix B, Reportable Fields in Red Hat CloudForms.
3.1. Running Reports
There are two different ways to generate a report: by scheduling the report, or running the report manually by clicking the report generation button on the Reports page. Red Hat CloudForms uses interactive report generation so that reports are placed on a queue. A visual indicator of the reports status is shown. All reports are automatically saved so that they can be downloaded and analyzed later.
3.1.1. Generating a Single Report
- Navigate to →
- Click the Reports accordion and select the report you want to view.
-
Click
(Queue).
The report generation is placed on the queue and its status shows in the reports page.
-
Click
(Reload current display) to update the status.
- When a report has finished generating, click on its row to view it.
3.2. Scheduling a Report
You can view historical data by creating reports on a scheduled basis. In addition, scheduled reports can be emailed directly to users.
There are two ways to schedule a report. Select a report from the Reports accordion and click
Configuration,
Add a New Schedule, or click the Schedules accordion and click
Configuration,
Add a New Schedule.
- In the Basic Information area, type in a Name and Description for the schedule.
- By default. Active is checked to enable the scan.
- Check E-Mail after Running to send an email after the report has been generated. The email will be sent to the users email address as show in the Accounts area in Configuration. The email will include a link to the report.
The Report Selection area is pre-populated if you added the schedule directly from the report. If you are adding from the schedule according, use the Filter drop downs to select the report that you want to schedule.
In the Timer area, click the Run drop down to specify how often you want the analysis to run. Your options after that will depend on which run option you choose.
- Click Once to have the analysis run just one time.
- Click Daily to run the analysis on a daily basis. You will be prompted to select how many days you want between each analysis.
- Click Hourly to run the analysis hourly. You will be prompted to select how many hours you want between each analysis.
- Type or select a date to begin the schedule in Starting Date.
- Select a Starting Time based on a 24 hour clock in the Red Hat CloudForms appliance’s Time Zone.
To send an email that includes an attachment with the report contents, check Send an E-mail. Parameters required for sending an email are displayed.
- In From (leave blank for default), type in the sending email.
- Use Add a User, to select a specific user. The user must have a valid email address entered under accounts.
- Use Add (enter manually) to type in the address not registered to a User.
-
Then, click
(Add).
If you are sending an email after the report runs, then you can select further options under Email Options.
- Check Send if Report is Empty if you want an email even if no records exist in the report.
- Next to Attachments, check if you would like the report attached as a Text, CSV, or PDF file.
- Click Add.
You may need to disable, change the report filter, or change the frequency of a schedule. To do this, you will need to edit the schedule.
3.2.1. Modifying a Report Schedule
- Navigate to →
- Click the Schedules accordion and select the schedule you want to edit.
-
Click
(Configuration), then click
(Edit this Schedule).
- Make the required changes.
- Click Save.
3.2.2. Running a Scheduled Report Immediately
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Schedules accordion and select the schedule you want to run.
-
Click
(Configuration), then click
(Queue).
3.3. Viewing Reports
Once you have created a schedule for a report, you can view it at any time after the first scheduled time has occurred.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Saved Reports accordion or the Reports accordion.
- Click on the instance of the report you want to view.
3.3.1. Changing Report Views
Some reports can be viewed as charts as well as lists. Note that this will depend on the type of data and on how the report has been created. Where applicable, you will see these additional buttons.
- Navigate to → .
Click the report to view. Click one of the following buttons for the view you want.
-
Click
for Graph View.
-
Click
for Hybrid View.
-
Click
for Tabular View.
-
Click
3.3.2. Report Download Buttons
When you click on one of the supplied reports, you are presented with a group of buttons to download the report in one of three formats or to view the report in a full screen.
Edit and delete buttons are only visible to administrators and super administrators. Edit and delete functions are only available to customer-created reports. The Red Hat CloudForms pre-configured reports cannot be edited or deleted, but they can be copied.
3.3.3. Downloading a Report
Download reports to analyze the data using other tools or to print the report.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the report you want to view.
- Click on the row for the instance of the report you want to download. If the report needs to be generated, see Section 3.1, “Running Reports”.
Click on the report download buttons for the type of export you want.
-
Click
(Download this report in text format) to download as text.
-
Click
(Download this report in csv format) to download as a comma-separated file.
-
Click
(Download this report in PDF format) to download as PDF.
- The report is automatically named with the type of report and date.
-
Click
3.3.4. Showing a Report in Full Screen
View the report in full screen to zoom into the report screen. From full screen, you can also print the chart that accompanies a report.
3.4. Adding a Report
Add reports if the default reports do not include what you need or you want to narrow the scope of a report. For example, you may want a report that shows only Windows virtual machines.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Reports accordion.
-
Click
(Configuration), then click
(Add a New Report).
In the Columns tab, edit the Basic Report Info area.
- Type a unique name in Menu Name for how you want the report described in the menu list.
- Type the Title you want displayed on the report in title.
Add fields in the Configure Report Columns area.
Use the Base the report on table dropdown to choose a table to get fields from.
NoteIf you change the report base or the interval, all selections below will be reset.
-
Select fields that you want in the report from Available Fields, and then click
(Move selected fields down)
. In addition to the fields, you can also select any tags that you have created and assigned. -
Change the order of the fields in the report by clicking
(Move selected fields up)
or(Move selected fields down)
.
Click on the Consolidation tab to consolidate and aggregate data points into maximum, minimum, average, and total. Specifically, this would be useful for analyzing performance data over a specific period of time. Note that if you do this, you will not see individual records, but rather the calculation as a column header.
Select the columns to group by.
- For each numeric field selected in the report, you can click the dropdown under Calculations. Check the calculations you want to use.
Click on the Formatting tab to set the size of paper for a PDF and column header format.
From the PDF Output area, select the page size from the dropdown.
From Specify Column Headers and Formats, type the text you want displayed for each field. For each numeric field, you can also set the numeric format.
Click on the Styling tab to change the color of the text or the background for a row based on a condition.
- Use Style to select the format for the value. You can choose to change the text color or the background.
- Use If to create a conditional statement for the style.
Click on the Filter tab to set filters for the data displayed in the report. There are two types of filters: the first is the Record Filter which is the primary filter of the main tables records, the second is also a Display Filter, which is a secondary filter of rows based on the fields of the child table. Click
in the appropriate area to use the expression editor to choose the appropriate options for your criteria. Based on what you choose, different options will show.
Click Field to create criteria based on field values.
Click Count of to create criteria based on the count of something, such as the number of snapshots for a virtual machine, or the number of virtual machines on a host.
Click Tag to create criteria based on tags assigned to your resources. For example, you may want to check the power state of a virtual machine or see if it is tagged as production.
Click Registry to create criteria based on registry values. For example, you may want to check if DCOM is enabled on a Windows system. (Note that this applies only to Windows operating systems.)
Click Find to seek a particular value, and then check a property. For example, finding the
Admin
account and checking that it is enabled.Click
(Commit Expression Element Changes)
to add the expression.NoteThe filters that you apply will show at the bottom of the report so that you know which filters have been applied.
Click on the Summary tab to select sort order, sort type, groupings, and group calculations for the report. Summary groups rows of data based on the sort breaks. You can only sort by fields that display in the report.
- Set the primary sort in Sort the Report by.
- Set the next sorts in Within Above Field, Sort By.
- Select the type of sort, ascending or descending, in Sort order.
In Show Sort breaks, select Yes to show the sort breaks, Counts to show sort breaks with the count, or No for no sort breaks.
- For any numeric field, you can select to show minimum, average, maximum, and total in the sort break.
Click on the Charts tab to create a chart for the report. This is not required.
- Use Choose a chart type to select a type of chart. Note that some charts may not produce the result you are looking for based on the types of fields in the report and its sort order.
- If you only want to see the top values, select the number of top values from Top values to show.
- If you want to see the total number of values that are not categorized or evaluated against others, check Sum 'Other' values.
Click on the Timeline tab to select a timeline for the report. You must have a field of time or date format to use this feature.
- Use Base Timeline on to select a column in date or time format for the report.
- Select a unit of time for the first band in First band unit.
- Select a unit of time for the second band in Second band unit.
- Select a unit of time for the third band in Third band unit.
- Select an Event to position at.
Select the range for the event to position from Show events from last.
NoteIf you select a timeline for a report, that timeline will also show on the timelines page of Cloud Intelligence. The filters that you apply will show on a timeline report so that you know which filters have been applied.
- Click the Previews tab to see a sample of your report.
- When you have the report that you want, click Add to create the new report.
After the new report is created, to make the report accessible from the report menu, you must add it to a report menu.
3.5. Copying a Report
Use this feature to copy a report that is similar to one that you want to create. By copying a report, you only need to make minor edits instead of creating an entirely new report.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Reports accordion and select the report that you want to copy.
-
Click
(Configuration), then click
(Copy this report).
- On the Columns tab, edit the Basic Report Info area to include a new Menu Name. Each Menu Name must be unique.
- Make any other changes you need. See "Adding a Report" for details on the changes you can make.
- Click Add.
3.6. Editing a Report
If you find that a report is not giving you the data that you need, you can edit it after it has been created. Note that only reports that you have created can be modified. Only administrators and super administrators of Red Hat CloudForms can add, copy, edit, and delete reports.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Reports accordion and select the report you want to edit.
-
Click
(Configuration),
(Edit this Report).
- Make any changes you need.
- Click Save.
3.7. Deleting a Report
Delete reports when you find that they are no longer useful. Only administrators and super administrators of Red Hat CloudForms can add, copy, edit, and delete reports. Note that only customer-created reports can be deleted.
- Navigate to → .
- Click the Reports accordion and select the report you want to delete.
Click
(Configuration),
(Delete this Report from the Database).
NoteThe Delete this report from the Database option will only appear on reports you have created. Default reports cannot be deleted.
- Click OK.
3.8. Importing a Report
Reports are stored in the VMDB; however, you can share customized reports among VMDBs. To do this use the export and import feature of reports.
- Navigate to → .
- In the Import/Export accordion, click Custom Reports.
- In the Import area, click Browse to select an import file.
- To overwrite an existing report with the same menu name, select Overwrite existing reports.
- Click Upload to import the report to the Company-Custom folder.
3.9. Exporting a Report
Reports are stored in the VMDB; however, you can share customized reports among VMDBs. To do this use the export and import feature of reports.
- Navigate to → .
- In the Import/Export accordion, click Custom Reports.
- In the Export area, select the reports to export.
- Click Export.