Importing / Exporting Reports and Views in vRealize Operations Manager

This one would be quick note to tell you about the feature of Exporting and Importing Reports in vRealize Operations. In one of my previous articles, I wrote about creating a report out of a dashboard. Here is the link to that article. 

We all know that with Custom Reports, you can also pull in the Views to showcase a List, Chart etc with the kind of data you want in a vROps report. Hence, if you would need to create the View first and then create a report in which you would use that View. With vROps you do have the option of exporting a report and importing the same into any instance of vROps since all these reports are dynamic and are based on the Object Metrics.

The good news is that if you plan to import a pre-created report from on vROps instance to another, you would just need to import the Report and any custom views (one or more) would automatically get imported along with the report. You can then use these views in other reports as well in case you wish to.

Now this not only is a very handy feature, but this opens the platform for you to create and exchange reports with other members in the vCommunity pretty easily. This also gives me a task to share some of the reports which I have been creating for my clients through my blog.

Stay tuned for some Custom Reports which can please your business & management stakeholders with this powerful feature of vRealize Operations.

As always!!! Share & Spread the Knowledge.

Using Custom Reports To Publish Dashboards in vRealize Operations 6.1

As I am exploring vRealize Operations 6.1, I am unearthing the goodness of the new features which are introduced with this release. One of the biggest feature for me which the product delivers now is the new enhanced reporting feature. This reporting feature allows you to import a Custom Dashboard into a report. Yes you read it right!!

This was the single biggest ask by many of my customers for whom, I would create a custom dashboard. While the dashboards are priceless from a perspective of real time monitoring with the widgets such as Heat-maps, Health Widgets etc, the customers always wanted to have a feature where in they could automatically send out a report with the dashboard included to higher management or application users via email.

While the reporting engine in vRealize Operations 6.0.x is by far amazing, with 6.1 the solution also allows you to import a Dashboard into a Custom Report as publish them as reports. 

Without further-ado let's have a quick look as to how you can do this:

1- Let's say this is the dashboard which you want to publish in a Custom Report. This is a cluster capacity dashboard.

2- Click on Content - > Reports to open the report engine.

3- Click on the "+" sign under Report Templates to add a new Report.

4- Provide a Name and Description to begin with.

5- As a next step, you have the option to either add a VIEW or a DASHBOARD to the Report. Here is a drop-down which shows both the options.

6- Select Dashboard and now you will be able to see all the dashboards which you have in your vROps instance under Data Type. You can see the Cluster Capacity Dashboard here.

7- You need to DRAG & DROP this dashboard on the right pane to incorporate the same in the report.

8- On the next screen you have the option of selecting the report formats and the layout.

8- Finally you can customize the layout by adding images, footers etc and then save the report template.

9- You can see the new report we just created. Highlight the same an click on RUN button to execute the report.

10- You need to now select the Object on which you have to run the report. In this case, it would be a cluster and click on OK for the report to execute.

11- Once the report is processed, click on the Generated Reports Tab, and then click on the PDF link to down the report.

12- Once you open the PDF, you will see the cluster capacity dashboard in the report.

And that's it! You can schedule this report and send out to recipients automatically via email, or also dump it on a file share if you wish to.

Hope this helps you to use this FANTASTIC feature of custom reporting to meet the reporting needs of your business.

Do not forget to SHARE & SPREAD THE KNOWLEDGE!!