Eugene Bykov : Tips & tricks

Including time stamp in subscription report file name

eugenebykov — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:42:00 GMT

Operations Manager Report subscription wizard asks you to specify a File Name when you choose Windows File Share delivery method. In most cases where you just need to have a most recent report delivered to the share you would just type a desired name in the field and look for the result then the time comes. If you would like to keep the history though, you would probably want to include something like a time stamp in the file name to keep the names unique and prevent reporting server overriding the results every time a new report is generated. To do the trick you can add @timestamp variable to the File name. For example: Report@timestamp. The resulted file name will look something like Report2009_10_05_000000 which would not only allow you to keep the names unique but would also give everyone an immediate idea on when the file was generated.

Read more about File Share Delivery in SQL Reporting Services documentation.

Opening views and executing tasks from reports

eugenebykov — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:20:00 GMT

SCOM 2007 reporting infrastructure has an ability to invoke a view or execute a task defined in a Management Pack from a report. This functionally helps bringing context from the report "back" to the operation console. Most of the out-of-the-box SCOM 2007 reports leverage this feature to open various typed of monitoring or in certain cases even authoring views.

Reference to a view or a task is a regular RDL Hyperlink that points to a specially formatted URI. This formatting lets SCOM console to treat it as an execute a view or a task command rather than a report drill-down. There is a ConsoleIntegration class that helps in formatting console links correctly. This class is defined in the SCOM reporting code extension library (Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Reporting.Code.dll) that is shipped with the product and installed into Report Server Bin directory during setup. You need to reference this library to make it available for the report code to call.

<CodeModules>
<CodeModule>Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Reporting.Code, Version=6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral</CodeModule>
</CodeModules>

After the library is referenced you can start using it. Here is an example that references State view from a report:

<Textbox Name="textbox">
    ...
        <Action>
            <Hyperlink>= Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Reporting.ConsoleIntegration.CreateConsoleViewLink(
                                    Fields!ManagementGroupGuid.Value,
                                    "Microsoft.SystemCenter.StateView",
                                    Fields!ManagedEntityGuid.Value)
            </Hyperlink>
        </Action>
    ...
</Textbox>

ConsoleIntegration class defines a set of overloads for links. Here is the list:

string CreateConsoleViewLink(
Guid managementGroupId,
string viewName,
Guid viewTarget)

string CreateConsoleViewLink(
string managementGroupId,
string viewName,
string viewTarget)

string CreateConsoleTaskLink(
Guid managementGroupId,
string taskName,
Guid taskTarget)

string CreateConsoleTaskLink(
string managementGroupId,
string taskName,
string taskTarget)

Since data warehouse can collect data for multiple management groups "managementGroupId" is a required parameter for all calls.

The important thing to remember is that these links make sense only in a context of SCOM console. They will fail to execute in case you try to clink on them in default SQL Report Manager interface. To avoid these failures you need to make sure you declare Interactive parameter in your report. SCOM console always sets this parameter to True when the report is executed in the console.

<ReportParameter Name="Interactive">
    <DataType>Boolean</DataType>
    <Nullable>true</Nullable>
    <DefaultValue>
        <Values>
            <Value>=False</Value>
        </Values>
    </DefaultValue>
    <Prompt>Interactive</Prompt>
    <Hidden>true</Hidden>
</ReportParameter>

The last step is to make sure you use the parameter to hide hyperlinks in the report.

<Visibility>
<Hidden>=Parameters!Interactive.Value <> True</Hidden>
</Visibility>

Enabling EnterpriseManagementChartControl in Visual Studio 2005

eugenebykov — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:16:00 GMT

If you try editing some generic reports like Performance in Visual Studio you will get an error saying that EnterpriseManagementChartControl is not installed. The reason is that SCOM 2007 does not configure EnterpriseManagementChartControl development environment during normal install. If you like to use chart control designer in Visual Studio you would need to configure it manually. Here are the steps:

Make sure SCOM 2007 Reporting is installed.
Copy MicrosoftRSChart.dll and MicrosoftRSChartDesigner.dll from SSRS bin directory to Visual Studio private assemblies directory on your development machine.

Location of SSRS bin directory depends on the way you install SQL Sever but usually the path looks like this: \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.N\Reporting Services\ReportServer\bin

Visual Studio private assemblies directory usually could be found under \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies
Find RSReportDesigner.config file in the Visual Studio private assemblies directory and add the following records to it:
<Configuration>
    <Extensions>
            ...
            ...

        <ReportItemDesigner>
            <ReportItem Name="EnterpriseManagementChartControl"
                    Type="Dundas.ReportingServices.DundasChartDesigner,
                              MicrosoftRSChartDesigner" />
        </ReportItemDesigner>
        <ReportItems>
            <ReportItem Name="EnterpriseManagementChartControl"
                    Type="Dundas.ReportingServices.DundasChart,
                              MicrosoftRSChart" />
        </ReportItems>
        <ReportItemConverter>
            <Converter Source="Chart" Target="EnterpriseManagementChartControl"
                    Type="Dundas.ReportingServices.RSChartConverter,
                              MicrosoftDundasRSChartDesigner" />
        </ReportItemConverter>

    </Extensions>
</Configuration>
Restart Visual Studio.

Please note that these steps will only work with SCOM 2007 SP1 RC or later releases. The files mentioned here were not a part of SCOM 2007 RTM.

Creating new Report Operator user role

eugenebykov — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:55:00 GMT

The question keeps popping up so I decided to put this on my blog. SCOM 2007 console does not have an ability to create a new Report Operator user role. Part of the reason is that there is no UI to grant permissions to individual reports from SCOM console either. You can however grant permissions to reports using standard SSRS Report Manager interface as it described in the SCOM documentation (How to Set Permissions on a Report Using Command Shell in Operations Manager 2007). The one thing which is left unspecified is how to create a new Report Operator role so you can put users you like to grant or restrict access to into it.

So here is a script to create a new Report Operator user role using Command Shell:

$mg = (get-item .).ManagementGroup
$reportOperator = $mg.GetMonitoringProfiles() | where {$_.Name -eq "ReportOperator"}
$obj = new-object Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Monitoring.Security.MonitoringUserRole

$obj.Name = "TestReportOperatorRole"
$obj.DisplayName = "Test Report Operator Role"
$obj.Description = "Test Report Operator Role"
$obj.MonitoringProfile = $reportOperator

$mg.InsertMonitoringUserRole($obj)

After you execute this script “Test Report Operator Role” appears in UI and you would be able to add users to it using User Role Properties dialog.

Getting performance report chart data

eugenebykov — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 02:19:00 GMT

Several customers asked us lately if there is a way of getting actual values the performance report charts are generated on in a tabular form. Even thought this is not possible in the Performance report it is in fact possible with the Performance Detail report.

Performance Detail report could be either run directly or as a drill down from the Performance report. The report shows detailed performance chart along with a summary table below. If you choose to display histogram in the parameter block a “Detail Table” link appears inside the summary table. The link allows you to see a value table the chart is based on.

Unfortunately in RTM version of SCOM the “Detail Table” link is disabled for non-histogram reports. However if you export this non-histogram report to Excel or XML format the value table will be exported as well and could be easily viewed or used in your custom application.