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 reports is derived from the Discovery and Snapshot job runs in TrueSight Server Automation. Some of the information also 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 .

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 reports, BMC recommends that you download and install the default inventory templates for complete Inventory reporting (see Installing Inventory templates) and set up jobs in TrueSight 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 TrueSight Server Automation online 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.

• .NET Assemblies
• BLFile
• Object Overflow
• Registry

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 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 you are using the Inventory model to create reports, the reports display only one of these strings. All rows are displayed if you are using the Change Tracking model to create reports.
• If the snapshot for the .Net Assemblies on a server has the same Assembly Names and you are using the Inventory model to create reports, the reports display only one of these names. All Names are displayed if you are using the Change Tracking model to create reports.
• 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.
• 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 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
• The Change String column in the Change Tracking reports can display a maximum of 2000 characters. 

Running ETL

Once you have set up Discovery and Snapshot Jobs and enabled assets, run ETL to transfer the data to the reports data warehouse.

Related topic

Inventory reports