Wow, in the end you will not believe what a good trick reporting is for SCOM. At first we always tend to dive into the technical stuff of designing and installing SCOM, distributing agents, importing management packs, tuning management packs and getting in custom management packs either from third parties or community or made by ourselves and getting all kinds of hardware and software and network devices monitored. But at some point we will need to know what is going on with our SCOM install and its performance, and management will have requirements on performance reporting, service level agreement reporting, capacity management, changes, alert volumes and so on. This is where the reporting feature jumps in. A lot of SCOM management packs come with built-in reports, usually based on some of the parent reports included with SCOM. These are mostly geared toward performance reporting on availability or performance counters of a monitored component (IIS, Exchange, SQL and so on). Then there are the reports from the SCOM management pack, which tell you more about SCOM itself (as it is also a monitored product). Next to that there are also community based report sets which are geared toward certain aspects of interest, for instance reports on disk space usage and reports on SCOM performance.
In many cases you will want to create reports based on the parent reports. Let’s say you have a group of computers that support a certain business application and its owner wants to know the CPU usage of these machines during office hours for the last 30 days. These are quite easy to make in most cases and there are several howto’s available. To be listed below.
In some cases you want very specific reports that cannot be covered by the way the generic reports have been setup. In that case you will have to build a complete report yourself. There are report authoring guides for that. Check out some of the links below.
In any case there is a lot of data in the data warehouse (reporting database) that can be pulled out. All having to do with the monitoring system, alerts, performance counters and availability. If you haven’t done so already, take a good look at reporting and what it can do for you. For very large implementations the consultants often take a hard look at what reporting requirements there are, because in some cases a customer has a hard requirement for 10 performance counters and have no interest in anything else and that means we can disable a lot of performance counter collection rules that inflate the reporting datawarehouse (especially if you are running towards 1000+ agents and so on).
So perhaps some additional links:
TechNet Report Authoring guide
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg508710.aspx
Reporting Links (gathered links by Stefan Stranger), this is a very good list:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2011/01/27/opsmgr-custom-reporting-links.aspx
Also a nice post series by Marnix Wolf about reports (he has much more about this and other subjects, but I selected one):
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/07/opsmgr-and-empty-reports-part-1.html
Also check the systemcentercentral mp catalog for some custom reports:
http://www.systemcentercentral.com/PackCatalog.aspx
There are many more resources out there but this should be a good start. The list by Stefan is long enough to get a head start.
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