Demystifying Empty Reports in OpsMgr

I often hear from Operations Manager (OpsMgr) administrators that they generate performance reports for a particular collection rule and the report comes back blank when they are fairly certain that the data has been collected.

More often than not, the issue has to do with targeting within the report. It makes sense when it’s explained, but there’s still an element of logic in building the report that needs to be discussed.

When I deliver one of the OpsMgr workshops, I demo a specific example to illustrate what is going on and drive a few learning objectives along the way.

A Practical Example

Let’s say you want to report on the free disk space for a group of servers.

• In the Administrator Console, under Reporting, Microsoft Generic Report Library, select Performance Detail and click on Open:

• In the Report View, select standard parameters for Data Aggregation and time range (From / To), then click on Change.. to create a new series:

• Create a New Series, and select the Rule. In this case, select Logical Disk Free Megabytes 2008.

The problem comes when you choose between the Add Group… and Add Object… buttons:

 

Add Object…

In the case of free disk space, you probably want a report based on servers (or agents). For example, you would like to list the free disk space for a subset of servers (or even just a particular server), so you believe selecting Add Object… would be the way to go:

 

Unfortunately, this will result in an empty report:

 

Add Group…

If instead, you select Add Group… :

Then the report will contain data:

Targeting

So what’s going on and what’s the different between Add Group… and Add Object… ?

This is where targeting comes into play.

In this case, the performance collection rule Logical Disk Free Megabyte 2008 is targeted at the instances of Windows Server 2008 Logical Disk. That makes sense, but when you select Add Object… , you don’t select Windows Server 2008 Logical Disk instances, you select an instance of Windows Computer. Because the rule is not targeted at that class, no data is associated with it.

If you select individual instances of Windows Server 2008 Logical Disk as objects, then data would show up in the report:

Logically, if you build reports for free disk space, you want to order/sort/group be servers and then their drives. Having a report of all C: drives in your environment isn't easy to read, but because the performance collection rule is targeted at a different class than Windows Computer, you need to select Add Group… for any data to display.

I’ve also seen confusion (which I experienced myself before sorting this thing out for myself) with the fact that the “group” in Add Group… doesn’t have the same meaning as “groups” in the Administration Console, under Authoring. In the report case, it refers to contained objects: the Windows Server 2008 Logical Disk instances are contained within the Windows Computer object. In the Authoring section of the Administrator Console, it refers to a collection of objects such as “all c: drives”.

Final Thoughts

Hope this helps clarify why some reports return no data. The support knowledge base has a troubleshooting KB article on empty reports for other cases, especially cases involving issues with OpsMgr.

Comments welcome!