SCE Sunday part 13 – Reporting

System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) relies on SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to show what’s going on with your infrastructure.  As I mentioned in part 1, you need to either set this up at install time or point to an existing installation of SSRS. Once you have done that the reports you get will depend on which management packs you installed and whether you elected to setup SCE to manage virtual machines. I have made a short screencast introducing reporting in SCE here.

Other things to note, if the screencasts aren’t your thing:

• You can put your own reports in the SCE reporting folders and they’ll show up in SCE. You can write your own reports or customise what’s provided (make a copy or you could loose your work if the report is updated by a SCE update) using Report Builder or BI development studio that come with SQL Server.
• You can subscribe/schedule reports to run from the Report Manager portal. The screens to help you do this are smart enough to prompt you to complete any parameters needed by a report. 
• The virtualisation reports that are inherited form System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will exclude the SCE server itself form the utilisation reports which confused me as in my demo rig SCE is simply another virtual machine.

This is the last in the series on SCE, and if you now want to try any of the stuff I have shown you over the last few weeks it’s included in  the TechNet Subscriptions  here or you can get a time bombed trial version here.