Reporting

The reporting feature displays site information by retrieving specified sets of data from the SMS site database and displaying it in an organized format.

By using reporting, you manipulate reports. A report is an SMS object that consists of a set of properties that describe the report, such as the report's name. The primary property in a report's definition is its SQL statement, which specifies the data that needs to be retrieved from the SMS site database and then be displayed.

SMS 2003 provides many predefined reports. These reports can display a variety of information, such as hardware inventory data, software inventory data, and status messages data. You can use predefined reports to retrieve and display data about your site, such as clients that are low on disk space, or clients that have a specific network card. You can also create new reports that display other information that is useful to your organization.

You can create, configure, and manage reports by using the SMS Administrator console. You can run reports by using Report Viewer, which is a browser-based application that runs in Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. By using Report Viewer, users can run reports without accessing an SMS Administrator console.

Reporting also supports dashboards, which are sets of reports in a grid that you can display in a single window of Report Viewer. You can use a single dashboard to monitor information about a variety of SMS objects or systems.

You can also extend the reporting feature by creating supplemental reports. Supplemental reports can be custom Active Server Pages files, HTML files, text files, or any file that you can display by using Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. You can use any tool, including tools that are external to SMS, to create a supplemental report.

To create or modify the SQL statements of reports, you need to have a basic understanding of SQL. You also need to understand the underlying SMS data classes, which are presented in the SQL Server views that reporting uses to obtain information.

Reporting is supported only on primary sites, because secondary sites do not have a database server.

How Reporting Works

To use reporting, you must set up at least one reporting point in the site. A reporting point is an SMS site system that hosts Report Viewer and where you can store supplemental reports. IIS 5.0 or later must be enabled on the reporting point site system server.

When you set up a reporting point, SMS creates a designated URL that users can use to access that reporting point. If you anticipate heavy demand for reports in your site, you can create more than one reporting point and then point different groups of users to the different reporting point URLs.

After the site has a reporting point, you can run and manage reports. You use the SMS Administrator console to create, modify, delete, export, and import reports. In the SMS Administrator console, you can filter the list of reports by categories. You can then sort the list to quickly locate a specific report.

You use Report Viewer to display the list of available reports and to run reports. When Report Viewer runs, it displays only the reports that the user has permission to view. The reports are categorized to help you locate a specific report that you need to run.

When a user runs a report, the results are based on the data that is retrieved by the report's SQL statement. The SQL statement accesses read-only SQL Server views, instead of SMS site database tables. The report retrieves the specified data and displays it in an Internet Explorer window.

You can start Report Viewer either from the SMS Administrator console or by typing the designated URL for a reporting point in the Address box of Internet Explorer.

Benefits of Reporting

You can use reports to view selected data from the site's database in a clear and organized format. When considering solutions, decision-makers in your organization need different sets of data, at different detail levels, presented in different ways. By using reporting, you can create reports that present necessary data in a way that is most beneficial to your organization. This helps you to make correct decisions.

Reporting is also useful for site maintenance. You can run reports as you need them, or you can schedule reports to run on a regular basis to help detect and diagnose problems early. For example, if there is a problem with a specific client, you can run a report that displays that client's recent errors. To ensure continued site health, you can regularly run a report that displays site status. Other reports, such as reports that display software distribution status and software usage, can also help with site maintenance.

A report can link to other related information, such as another report, or a URL. Links provide quick access to additional relevant information. For example, you can link a report that lists discovered computers to a report that provides recent error messages. Every discovered computer that is displayed has a link to error messages associated with that computer.

A report can also have prompts. You can use prompts to limit the report's scope based on information that the user enters when the report runs. For example, you can specify a report that retrieves all the clients running a certain product and you can include a prompt for the user to provide a product name. Every time that the report runs, the user enters a product name and the report displays the clients that are running the specified product.

Reports can display a single data set based on a single SQL Select statement or multiple data sets based on multiple SQL Select statements.

After running a report, you can do a number of things with the displayed data. For example, you can display the data as a chart, you can save the data as a comma-delimited (.csv) file, or you can add the report to your list of favorites in Internet Explorer.

Reporting Throughout the Site Hierarchy

Reports do not propagate up or down the SMS hierarchy, and they run against the current SMS site database only. Because primary sites contain data from lower level sites, when a report retrieves data from the SMS site database, it might retrieve data that was propagated from a lower level site, if appropriate.

Occasionally, it might be useful to share reports between SMS sites. For example, administrators who are familiar with SQL can write reports and share these reports with administrators who are not familiar with SQL. To accomplish this, you can export report object definitions from your SMS site database to a MOF file. You can import MOF files back into the current SMS site database or into another SMS site database. When running a report that was imported from another site, the report runs against the current SMS site database.

For More Information

Did you find this information useful? Please send your suggestions and comments about the documentation to smsdocs@microsoft.com.