Setting up data collection for Inventory and Change Tracking reports

The Inventory and Change Tracking reports provide details about the hardware and software objects and the associated changes 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 and Change Tracking reports and a few considerations about these reports.

Setting up data collection

Information in the Inventory and Change Tracking reports is mainly derived from the Discovery and Snapshot job runs in BMC 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 Jobs in the BMC Server Automation documentation.

The Change Tracking reports show information only if there are changes captured in a Snapshot Job run. Before you can collect data for the Inventory and Change Tracking reports, BMC recommends that you download and install the default inventory templates for complete Inventory reporting (see Installing Inventory templates and other scripts) and set up jobs in BMC Server Automation. In addition to the default inventory templates, you can also create your own templates based on the Hardware Information and the supported native assets. For more information about creating templates, see the BMC Server Automation online documentation.

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

Enabling assets for Inventory reporting

By default, the data for the following assets is not transferred from the BMC Server Automation database to the reports data warehouse. Also, data for these assets is not migrated to version 8.5 of BMC Decision Support for Server Automation from earlier versions. Therefore, you cannot see data for these assets in the built-in and ad hoc 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 and Change Tracking reports

In Microsoft Windows environments, the following conditions apply to the Server Configuration built-in report and ad hoc Inventory and Change Tracking 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.
Starting from version 8.2, 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 BMC Server Automation with the Enabling Rolling Execution: Run against no more than.. Servers at the same time option set, BMC Decision Support 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 BMC 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
The Change String column in the Change Tracking reports can display a maximum of 2000 characters. To view the entire change string for an asset, concatenate the data from the snapshot table for the asset and the Object_Overflow_Detail table. For example, to see the entire change string for a UNIX process, concatenate the data from the Delta String column (F_BMC_UNIXPROCESS_SNAPSHOT table) and the value column (Object_Overflow_Detail table).
If the data getting transferred from BMC 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.

Setting up data collection for Inventory and Change Tracking reports