Report Scope
Before generating a report, you select enterprise objects such as the storage arrays, hosts or a list of hosts, fabrics, zones, or switches to include in the report scope.
• Host Groups. Refers to the host groups, and host sub-groups that you can choose, depending on the home group to which you belong. By using host groups, rather than selecting specific hosts, you enable dynamic content that reflects changes in your enterprise topology. Host groups are relevant for backup, host capacity, file analytics, and virtualization management reporting. In addition, several related sub-categories can be selected to narrow report scope: Devices, Volumes, and Deduplication/VTL Appliances. Reports list the full path of the host group in report headers. When selecting host groups in the Scope Selector, the full path of the host group is displayed in the bottom display panel.
• Hosts. Select specific hosts for a static report. A static report does not take into account changes in your network topology, so if you add clients to a network, you either have to explicitly include them in your report scope or add them to a host group. To ensure that host are always included in reports, assign them to a host group and select host groups for your report scope. For backup reports, a variety of components can be selected to be available in the Report Template’s scope selector; for example, Consecutive Errors, Ignore Retries, and Backup Window. For certain host reports, additional options may be available to filter the scope of the report, such as OS Platform (such as Windows or Linux), Product Collected (find hosts that have been collected from a particular subsystem, such as Veritas NetBackup), and Product Not Collected (find hosts that may be unprotected because they have not been collected from a particular subsystem, such as EMC Avamar). Reports list the full path of the host group in report headers. When selecting host groups in the Scope Selector, the full path of the host group is displayed in the bottom display panel.
• Host Type. Indicates how a host has been commissioned in an enterprise, such as VM Guest, VM Server, VIO Guest, VIO Server, or Others.
• Datastores and Hypervisors. For Storage Viewer for Virtual Servers, datastores and hypervisors can be selected for a report scope.
• Clusters. For Storage Viewer for Virtual Servers, clusters can be selected for a report scope. Cluster refer to the way ESX servers are grouped.
• Arrays. For capacity reports, select any of the following: storage array, array family, array vendor, or array product.
• SAN Fabrics (including Zones and Switches). Select specific SAN Fabric objects to narrow the scope of a report.
• Attributes. Refers to the attributes associated with objects—hosts, storage arrays, libraries, drives, switches, host Oracle database, and host MS Exchange; for example,
operating system could be an attribute that you want to associate with hosts. Attributes enable you to define a data set based on a specific characteristic. For more information, see
About Attributes.
Report scope objects are grouped into a hierarchical format, enabling disparate groupings. For example, hosts can be grouped by vendor, geography, department, and so on. This object grouping also provides additional data partitioning (security) by restricting a user’s view to hosts under the home host group. In addition, various built-in processes organize hosts based on information available from backup products; for example, group by master server or group backup servers by policy.
When you generate a report, a database query is initiated, based on the report scope that you specify. Since the nature of your IT environment is dynamic—for example, it’s not uncommon to add host groups and host to your network—reports reflect the updates.
Use the following guidelines to ensure that your reports include the data you expect to see:
• If you add new host groups after you generate a report, the next time you generate this same report, it will include different results. When you scope by host group or attributes, a dynamic report is produced.
• If you add hosts to your network, but do not assign them to a group, then generate a report without including the new hosts in your scope, you can be certain that the data for that host will not be in the report. This type of report scope produces a static report. However, if you add the host to a host group and this group is part of the report scope, the report automatically includes report data for that host.
For scope selections specific to an enterprise object, see: