Setting up data collection for Inventory reports

The Inventory reports provide details about the hardware and software objects in the server environment. Virtual Inventory reports provide details about the virtual machines in the environment. This topic explains how data is collected in Inventory reports and a few considerations about these reports.

Setting up data collection

Information in the Inventory reports is mainly derived from the Discovery and Snapshot job runs in TrueSight Server Automation. Some information comes from extended objects. For information about creating Discovery Jobs, see Creating Component Discovery Jobs. For information about creating Snapshot Jobs, see Creating Snapshot Jobsin the TrueSight Server Automation documentation.

Information in the Virtual Inventory reports is derived from Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job runs that take place in TrueSight Server Automation. To ensure that data is displayed in the Virtual Inventory reports, you must set the related virtualization properties in TrueSight Server Automation. For details, see Creating the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job and Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job - Properties in the TrueSight Server Automation documentation.

Enabling assets for Inventory reporting

By default, the data for the following assets is not transferred from the TrueSight Server Automation database to the reports data warehouse. Therefore, you cannot see data for these assets in the built-in and custom Inventory reports.

  • BLFile
  • Registry
  • Dot net assembly

To enable the data transfer and migration of these assets, you need to run a script. For more information, see Enabling-Inventory-assets.

Considerations for Inventory reports

In Microsoft Windows environments, the following conditions apply to the custom Inventory reports:

  • To ensure accurate Security Settings data in these reports, BMC recommends taking a snapshot at the top-most level of the Security Settings node. Taking snapshots at a lower level might generate inaccurate data.
  • If the snapshot for the local policy and the effective policy on a server have the same security settings, the reports display only the local policy for that server.
  • If the local policy and the effective policy are not defined for a server, the reports do not display any data for that server and its policies.
  • If the snapshot for the registry on a server has the same string as the registry key and the value (such as string value and binary value) in the same path and if you select the Show Latest Data option in Inventory reports, the reports display only one of these strings. All rows are displayed if you select the Show snapshot data (change tracking) option.
  • If the snapshot for the .Net Assemblies on a server has the same Assembly Names and if you select the Show Latest Data option in Inventory reports, the reports display only one of these names. All rows are displayed if you select the Show snapshot data (change tracking) option.
  • You can use custom templates along with the templates supplied by BMC to collect data for the out-of-the-box reports. When a report runs, the latest data for an asset is collected. For example, if two snapshot jobs gather information for the same asset, the details from the latest run of the two jobs is used to display the data in the report for that asset.
  • BMC recommends that you do not add extended objects and any other parts to the templates supplied by BMC. The product upgrade process overwrites the BMC supplied templates. You can add extended objects or parts to custom templates to get any additional data for Inventory reporting.
  • If you do not want to collect specific configuration data for Inventory reports, remove the corresponding part from the templates supplied by BMC. For example, if you do not want collect data for daemons, you can remove the Daemons part from the BL - Linux Inventory template. The data for daemons is not collected by ETL and reports do not show this data.
  • If you have a Batch Job in TrueSight Server Automation with the Enabling Rolling Execution: Run against no more than.. Servers at the same time option set, TrueSight Smart Reporting for Server Automation shows only the latest Job run information for the child Jobs of the Batch Job, under the following conditions:
    • You select the Latest Job Runs option while running an out-of-the-box report.
    • You apply the Job Latest Run filter while creating a custom report.
      Select the All Job Runs option while running an out-of-the-box report or do not apply any filter while creating a custom report, if you want to view the data for all job runs.
  • If any of the following query items have a value of NULL or blank in the TrueSight Server Automation database and you combine them with any query items from the Inventory/Common/Hardware Information query subject, the ad hoc report shows data for a server in multiple rows instead of one row:
    • Inventory/Server/Server Decommission Date
    • Inventory/Snapshot Template/Deleted Date
    • Inventory/Snapshot Job/Deleted Date
  • If the data getting transferred from TrueSight Server Automation in the Inventory/Common/Extended Objects/Full Name query item for an extended object exceeds 2000 characters, ETL does not load the row containing that extended object in the reports data warehouse.

Related topics

Inventory-reports

 

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