I was asked recently to help solve a problem whereby a customer had the need to report on the availability of their servers over time. Easy you may think, run the availability report and you are done! (Well this was my first response; turns out they had a much more specific requirement!)
The customer had configured their health models for alerting accordingly and was extremely satisfied from a monitoring perspective, the problem came when they wanted to produce monthly availability figures. The needed to produce not just what health states the servers went through over time as per the health model, but they also just had a need to report on how long the server was simply up over the same period.
So the next thing I told them was to read Eugene’s blog and the article on how to do this - http://blogs.msdn.com/eugenebykov/archive/2007/09/14/linked-availability-reports.aspx .
Eugene’s blog highlights the needed process, what I have added below is steps for a specific monitor and the sample files so you can try this out yourself.
1. Identify the monitor needed, in this case the Computer Not Reachable monitor. (This monitor determines simply if the computer can be pinged or not)
1. Create a group to hold all the servers you wish to report on. The monitor in this example is targeted at the Health Service Watcher so our group needs to contain these items.
2. Now create a linked report definition. This is done by creating a new custom MP to hold this information. The sample MP already contains the required information; under the <Parameters> element in this MP the default Monitor Name is as shown below:
<Parameters>
<Parameter Name="MonitorName">
<Value>Microsoft.SystemCenter.HealthService.ComputerDown</Value>
</Parameter>
</Parameters>
3. This MP is then imported into Operations Manager.
4. Run the report and select the group created in Step 1, once rendered the Availability report is targeted solely at this monitor – Computer not Reachable.
You are able to create a linked report that uses any enabled monitor. You will need to specify the monitor system name in the MP XML, which can be found by querying the vMonitor view in the Operations Manager Data Warehouse.
Also attached to this article are 2 performance linked reports that allow you to target a specific performance counter rather than selecting the counter each time. This is particularly useful if you have for example both the Windows 2000 MP and Windows 2003 MP and cannot when running the report determine which counter to choose.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Use of included utilities are subject to the terms specified at
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Daniel Savage
Program Manager | System Center Operations Manager