Managing reports

BMC Client Management's design is based on a client-server model where the master includes the database which provides storage for all objects of your system, providing therefore a wide range of information about your devices and objects, even if a device is powered-off or contact is lost. But while this information about all objects resides in the database, it serves no purpose to you unless it is retrieved and displayed in a report, thus guiding you through the history of your system. These reports can then help you to gain a better understanding of what happened in your system. Through a good understanding of past performance, you can prevent issues in the future and continue efficient operations.

BMC Client Management provides customizable reporting capabilities that present database information in the form of reports in a user-specified order and format. Predefined reports are available. For example, inventory and software distribution reports. You can also create your own reports on any object in the database. Reports can be presented in different formats, such as a table or a customizable graph and, depending on their type, they can be formatted as HTML, XML or PDF.

When selecting the report style and format, think of what kind of system information you need to have in your hand at the end of the day, week, or month. Define what you want that information to look like. Keep in mind that these reports can be very useful as status reports to management for strategic decision making, thus they can be sent to specific locations where associates with the respective access rights can read them, or for yourself to perform trend analysis, for example.

The population on which the report is to be executed can be defined either through queries or via assigned groups. Queries define the target population per subreport. A report consisting of several subreports can contain information about different objects of the population - one subreport might be limited to devices and a second one to rollouts executed on the entirety of this object type. If you assign one or more groups to your report, these are applicable to all subreport of this report and they are executed on the respective groups only, that is, with assigned device groups you can only produce reports which contain data on objects of type device.

Reports are created and generated via the console. They can be sent to specifically defined people by email or they can be exported in predefined formats or put at the disposal of a larger group of users via the Report Portal of the agent interface.

The main Reports node is a full-featured reporting tool, designed to help you create reports about all objects in your system. With this report generator, you can generate different reports, such as inventory, device group, events or other statistical reports. In addition, report folders can be created as organizational containers for different types of reports. They can contain any number of reports and further predefined or custom-made report folders for the management of the client system.

The Reports node has the following subnodes:

One for each report folder
One for each report

BMC Client Management comes with a number of predefined reports for its different functionalities that are imported at the time of installation. These reports are available in all supported languages and can be found directly under the Reports top node and in their respective directories. Therefore, before creating a new report, check if there is a predefined report or an already existing one for the version of the report you want which can be duplicated.

Managing reports

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