up.time can generate reports on the status of the servers in your environment, based on criteria that you specify. A report uses data that up.time has collected from a system, over a period of time that you specify. You can configure reports to run between certain hours of the day.
Reports are useful when you need to pinpoint the source of a problem within you environment. With a report, you can visually analyze how individual critical resources - such as memory, CPU, and disk resources - are being consumed. You can dynamically generate and view reports, schedule and email reports to other up.time users.
This chapter looks at the options that you can set to generate, save, and schedule reports. For more information about the individual reports and how to configure them, see Using Reports.
You can generate reports either dynamically or in the background. Dynamic reports are reports that up.time displays in a new Web browser window. Dynamic reports appear within several seconds or several minutes, depending on the type of report that you are generating and on the information that the report collects.
Background reports are reports that you schedule to be run at specific intervals using the up.time report queue. When it is time for a scheduled report to run, up.time puts the report into the report queue and determines that status of the report based on the following states:
The report is in the queue and is waiting to run.
The report is being generated.
The report has been generated, and has been sent (via email) to the users configured to receive that report.
For information on how to schedule reports, see Scheduling Reports.
If you do not receive a scheduled report, check the Report Log (see The Report Log) or contact your system administrator. |
up.time can generate reports in four ways:
Displays the report in a new window. This is the default option.
Converts the report to a PDF document, and displays it in a new window. You can save the PDF document to a local or network drive, or print it.
Displays the report, as an unformatted XML document, in a new window.
Enables you to email the report, as a PDF document attached to an email message, to:
Click User and then select the name of an up.time user to whom you want to send the report from the dropdown list.
Click Group and then select the name of an up.time user group to which you want to send the report from the dropdown list.
Click the Email Address option, and then type the email address of the person to whom you want to send the report in the field. To send the report to multiple recipients, type their email addresses in the field separated by commas or semi-colons. For example:
Reports that are sent by email have a file name that consists of the type of report and the date and time range it covers. For example, a CPU Utilization Ratio report might be named:
ReportCPUUtilizationRatio_2006-01-10_00-00-2006-01-10_14-53.pdf
If you choose to output the report to the screen, a message appears while the report is being generated. When the report has been generated, it is displayed in the report window. If up.time cannot connect to a host, the following error message appears in the report window:
An error occurred while running this report. Verify the configuration of up.time and try again.
If you find that you need to generate reports on a regular or frequent basis, you can save the parameters for the report to the DataStore. A link to the report appears in the My Portal panel. Click the link to generate the report. As well, see Report Generation Options for information on how up.time outputs reports.
You can also schedule reports to be generated and sent by email at particular intervals. See Scheduling Reports for more information. |
You can save reports to the file system of a server in your environment so others in your organization can view the reports. You can, for example, save a report to a Web server for viewing on your Intranet. The reports are saved as either PDF or HTML files. The system administrator can specify the directory on the server in which reports will be saved by adding the following entry to the file uptime.conf :
publishedReportRoot=<directory_name>
Where <directory_name> the directory into which up.time will write reports - for example, C:/Program Files/uptime software/uptime/ . The report files are saved to a subdirectory named GUI/published . You need permissions to write to the published directory.
up.time automatically names each report file. The file name contains the following information:
The following is an example of a report file name:
Service Outages_2006-01-24_rfripp.pdf
You can quickly view any reports that were generated on the Monitoring Station and saved to the file system. To do so, do the following:
The Report Library window appears. The Report Library window lists the reports that were generated on the Monitoring Station in descending order by date.
The Report Library window includes a search function that enables you to find specific reports.
If you need to run a report at a particular interval - for example, daily or weekly - you can schedule when the report should be generated. up.time generates the report and emails it to a user or group of users.For example, you generate a File System Capacity Growth Report - which charts the amount of disk usage for a system. However, the system for which you are generating the report schedules backups from midnight to 4:00 a.m. Due to the gap caused by the backup, the CPU usage and disk activity statistics are not indicative of the overall system load. You can specify that the report does not cover the periods of time over which the backups occur.
The Report Log tracks the progress and status of scheduled reports, or reports that are running in the background. Using the Report Log, you can quickly determine whether or not reports have been successfully generated. If they have not, then you can use the log to determine why report generation failed.
The Report Log subpanel tracks the status of reports in the following sections:
Reports that are in the report queue, and are waiting to run. This section contains the following information:
Reports that are being run. This section contains the same information as the Pending Reports section.
If the running report is not a scheduled report, Emailing report in PDF format appears in the Report Name column.
Reports that have finished running, whether they were successfully generated or not. This section contains the following information:
The report log appears in the Reports subpanel.
If there are no reports in the queue, up.time displays a message similar to the following ones in the Pending Reports and Running Reports sections of the Report Logs subpanel:
No reports are pending
No reports are running
Completed reports are stored in a table in the up.time DataStore. To free space in the DataStore, or to remove report log entries that you no longer need, you can delete entries in the report log from the Report Log subpanel.
When prompted to confirm whether or not you want to delete the report log entry, click OK .
A reporting instance is a transparent, license-free, up.time installation that is dedicated to generating and serving reports. If you offload all report-related tasks to a second instance, you can significantly reduce core load on your Monitoring Station.
If you are managing a large up.time deployment, you can consider implementing a reporting instance if many systems are included in your reports. Requirements will vary and depend on several factors, but as a general rule, a reporting instance may be appropriate if you have over 500 systems and regularly run reports with a month or more of data. Contact customer support for help on assessing your environment.When a deployment includes a reporting instance, the two up.time installations respectively perform the following functions:
In this deployment configuration, the Monitoring Station is still the main point of interaction for all up.time users; no one can log in to the reporting instance Web interface. When the Monitoring Station receives a report generation request or is scheduled to generate one, it seamlessly offloads the request to the reporting instance. Generated reports are stored on the reporting instance, which by default are the following:
/GUI/reportcache
for instantly generated reports/GUI/published
for scheduled reportsAll report-related configuration settings (whether reportCacheExpiryDays
in the up.time Configuration panel, the Mail Server settings on the Config tab, or publishedReportRoot
or reporting.prefetch.images.threads
in uptime.conf
) are modified on the Monitoring Station.
Before installing the reporting instance, ensure the following:
To set up a second up.time instance as a reporting instance, do the following:
uptime.conf
file, which is found at the root of the up.time installation.reportingInstance=true
connectionPoolMaximum=50
Configure the database settings so that the reporting instance connects to the same database your Monitoring Station is using:
dbDriver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver dbType=mysql dbHostname=reportingInstanceHostname dbPort=3308 dbName=uptime dbUsername=uptime dbPassword=uptime dbJdbcProperties= |
dbDriver=net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver dbType=mssql dbHostname=10.1.1.124 dbPort=1433 dbName=uptime dbUsername=uptime dbPassword=password |
dbDriver=oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver dbType=oracle dbHostname=oraserv dbPort=1521 dbName=uptime dbUsername=uptime dbPassword=password |
Ensure the other database platform's configuration lines have been commented out with the #
character.
Adding a reporting instance requires you to change your database to allow a user to connect to it from an external host. The following steps are for the MySQL database bundled with the Monitoring Station. If you are using Oracle or SQL Server as the DataStore, contact your database administrator to ensure that database can be accessed from the reporting instance.
<uptime>/mysql/bin
directory.mysql -uroot -puptimerocks
grant all privileges on uptime.* to "uptime"@"%" identified by "uptime";
%
with the actual hostname or IP address of the reporting instance.flush privileges;
If you are using the bundled MySQL database, increase the size of the connection pool, since each up.time instance attempts to open 100 database connections, and the MySQL default is 151.
<uptime>/mysql/my.ini
file in an editor.max_connections
value to 201 from its default value of 151.You will need to configure the Monitoring Station to communicate with (and send reports to) the reporting instance, as well as link the reporting instance's content back to the Monitoring Station so your users can access its generated reports.
commandPort
default from 9996
in the reporting instance's uptime.conf
file, update the default Remote Reporting Server Port here.Enter the following lines to add a custom tab to My Portal that points to the published reports folder on the reporting instance:
myportal.custom.tab2.enabled=true myportal.custom.tab2.name=Published Reports myportal.custom.tab2.URL=http://reportingInstanceHostname:9999/published/ |
Change the tab number to the next available number if you already have created any.
As an alternative, you can also make the reporting instance's |
After you have set up the Monitoring Station and the reporting instance, verify the two up.time instances can communicate with each other: