Chapter 8. MOM 2005 Reporting

The previous chapter introduced the database that is involved with storing MOM 2005 data for long periods (SystemCenterReporting ) and the database used for generating reports on that data (ReportServer). Although they work together to deliver the MOM 2005 Reporting solution, they are two different products. The ReportServer database is created when SQL 2000 Reporting Service (SRS) is installed and the SystemCenterReporting is created when MOM 2005 Reporting is installed. SQL Reporting Services on SQL 2000 is a standalone product that MOM 2005 Reporting builds on.

This chapter addresses the planning, implementation, and administration of SQL Reporting Services and MOM 2005 Reporting in support of the MOM 2005 Reporting Solution. It introduces the Report Manager, which is the primary tool used by administrators to manage and configure reports and reporting services, as well as by all users to access reports and to configure subscriptions to reports.

Authoring reports is not addressed since it requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 or newer. See Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Osborne/McGraw-Hill). As a MOM 2005 administrator, your daily tasks would not involve creating new reports and although that is not a difficult task, it's beyond the scope of what you need to know to successfully administer MOM 2005. For a decent tutorial on Reporting Services see Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Step by Step (Microsoft Press).

There is a sample set of reports (on the SQL reporting server CD under the Extras folder) that can be used for monitoring the longest and shortest time it takes to run a report, but it requires the MOM administrator to use Visual Studio. See Programming C# (O'Reilly) for an overview of Visual Studio.

Because MOM 2005 Reporting builds on SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, there is a whole string of items that must be installed in the correct order before importing MOM 2005 reports and making them available to users. The planning for this installation was completed in Chapter 2 when you calculated the starting size of the data warehouse database and its transaction logs and created the DAS account. With this out of the way, the next step is to begin installing the prerequisites.