Reports in Management Packs.

In my previous post “Authoring reports for SCOM 2007” I said that there are basically tree ways to author new reports for SCOM 2007. Create a linked report, use Report Builder or create a custom report using Visual Studio. The best way to introduce a new report in the system is to include it in a Management Pack (read “SCOM 2007 Report Catalog” post for details).

Any Management Pack (MP) can contain reports. If you have RDL file you can simply paste it content under Reporting/Report/Definition node in the MP.

Here is an example:

<Reporting>

  <Reports>

    <Report ID="Demo.MyReport" Accessibility="Public" Visible="true">

      <Definition>

        [Paste content of the RDL file here...]

      </Definition>

    </Report>

  </Reports>

</Reporting>

 

ID is the name your report is deployed under to the SSRS. ID is also a reference for your report inside the Operations Manager. It has to be unique inside the MP and if you specify Accessibility="Public" other management packs could reference your report if they like to use it as a drill-down or as a sub-report.

Your report is going to be visible inside the catalog if you set Visible to "true". Specify "false" if you author a sub-report or a drill down report that you don’t like to be a part of the list of reports users can run directly.

That’s it! Your report is ready to go. To complete the picture however you probably want to give you report a friendly name. That name is displayed in the console when user clicks on your management pack inside the Reporting navigation tree.

To give your report a friendly name you need to define a display string inside the management pack and target it to your report ID.

<LanguagePacks>

  <LanguagePack ID="ENU" IsDefault="true">

    <DisplayStrings>

      <DisplayString ElementID="Demo.MyReport">

        <Name>My Report</Name>

        <Description>My First SCOM 2007 Report</Description>

      </DisplayString>

    </DisplayStrings>

  </LanguagePack>

</LanguagePacks>