Custom reports

Custom reports

Unlike predefined reports, you can select the information that you want to include in custom reports. Custom reports can contain detailed information about the relationships between monitored resources, the properties of monitored resources, and detailed information about the performance of monitored resources.

To create a report, browse the list of monitored resources in your storage environment, and drag items that are associated with the resources into a report. For example, drag items that show capacity data for storage systems into a report.

If you create custom reports, you can also do the following tasks:

• Copy a predefined report and modify the copy to create a custom report.
• Create custom charts. You can create charts with data that is in the combinations that you want to see. Use these custom charts to troubleshoot and to report on the status of resources.
• Create reports with multiple charts. You can create multiple charts with different scales, and display those charts side-by-side. You can use these charts to compare performance metrics. For example, you can review read I/O rates and the number of bytes transferred in the same report.
• Create a custom folder structure to organize your custom reports.
• Run a report from a URL. You can include options for the report in the URL. For options that are not included in the URL, you can specify default values, or prompt the user to specify a value.
• Share a custom report with your organization, or keep it for only your own use. You can also distribute different sections of a report to different teams.

Advanced formatting for custom reports

You can create reports with basic formatting, or design more complex reports with advanced formatting.

Access related reports

You can configure custom reports so that you can click a resource in the report output to access other related reports. If you identify a problem in a report, you can open another report from within that report that might provide specific information about the problem.

For example, the Most Active Servers predefined report shows data for servers. Click the name of a server in the report to view the Summarized Performance of Volumes by Server report for the server. This report shows the aggregated data for all of the volumes on the server. Click the name of a volume in the report to view the Performance of Volumes by Server report for the volume.

Use GUI controls in reports

You can configure custom reports to include GUI controls to enable users to select options for the reports. You can specify default values for these options. In addition, you can create copies of reports with different default values.

The GUI controls that you can add to your reports enable users to select dates, type values, and select from lists. You can also create GUI controls whose values depend on what is selected in another GUI control. You can include GUI controls on the report output in HTML format so that users can change options and run the report again. For example, you can include a drop-down list in the HTML report output so that users can change the sort order of the data.

Schedule reports

You can schedule when to run the report. You can specify the following formats for the report: CSV, Excel, HTML, PDF, and XML. You can specify to email the report output and to save the report output to a location on your file system or on a web server. For example, you might require a monthly report that shows the usage of space on storage systems. Management staff might use this report to analyze changes in your storage system requirements. You can create this report and schedule it to run every month. You can specify that the report output is emailed to management staff, or saved to a location from which management staff can access it.