Business View reporting

[elwood]

Hi, Wonder if anyone can help me.
I need to generate monthly reports showing a business view category of 'customers', giving a total number of VMs, vCPU, RAM and Storage.
Version 8 business view had a really nice chart showing this (you hit a details button to expand the chart to show all customers), albeit that I could not work out how to report on it and had to screengrab.
Version 9 has altered business view and the details button seems to have disappeared. Now by editing the options, I only seem to be able to display up to 10 customers after which the remainder just show as 'other'.

I've also tried in vain to edit the Report Builder in Veeam Reporter, but I get lots of excess information that I don't need such as which hosts the VMs are on. The very top line of that report shows VMs, CPU, RAM and Storage which is exactly what I need on a per-customer basis.
Is there a simple way I can either generate a report with the bull business view, or cut down the unwanted fields in the report builder / customised reports?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Shestakov]

Hi Eliot,
Could you specify how you used to make the reports in v8? Did you make the report via Business view tab of the Monitor > Reports > Performance > Custom performance?
If so, there is a setting with a number of VMs to show besides a list of metrics to show.
Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

The details are now exposed on the dashboards (VM, Hosts, Storage, Clusters), it was just taken out from the drill down. As to creating a report like this use Custom Infrastructure report filtered by a BV group. Let me know if that helps.

[elwood]

Hi Shestakov,

In answer to your question, it wasn't the Reporter I was using it was the Business View tool itself. So in Version 8 on the VM Tab each of the graphs (including my customers group) have a Details button which expands the view to list everything in that group. Whereas in Version 9 that details button no longer seems to exist.
I never did use Custom Performance report - I couldn't see an obvious way to use that report for the information I need?

[Vitaliy S.]

Eliot, try to select VM as an object and add columns such as vCPU, allocated storage and RAM to the the report. Let me know if that helps!

[elwood]

Hi Vitaliy,

Dashboards in Reporter?
The Custom Infrastructure report looks the most promising - I can see all of the metrics there I need, it's just no matter how I try to filter it I cannot seem to get it into the view that I want.
The Goal is a one line listing per-customer (business group) listing no of VMs, vCPU, RAM and disk. What I'm getting is a full listing of every VM. There's also something odd, I'm getting a lot of duplication - VMs listed two three or four times. I added the UUID to see if they're ghost records, but every field appears identical - so I can't see where those duplications are coming from.
I don't suppose there are any sample Customer Infrastructure reports anywhere to help me?

Eliot.

[elwood]

Hi,

Yes, I've got VM set as the object type, and I've used Columns to get the CPU, RAM etc - so all of the information is present and correct. It's just displaying it on a per-customer basis that's the problem. I've tried variations of filtering by business group/category, sorting by, grouping by. I can get it to list "customers", but when expanded it just shows every VM in the caegory, I can't work out how to kill all of the unwanted categories such as Sample Business View and VMs without backups. I thought that filtering it with a filter like 'where business view group = customers' would help but then I get an empty report with no data available.

[Vitaliy S.]

There's also something odd, I'm getting a lot of duplication - VMs listed two three or four times. I added the UUID to see if they're ghost records, but every field appears identical - so I can't see where those duplications are coming from.
I don't suppose there are any sample Customer Infrastructure reports anywhere to help me?

Can you please remove disk data and see if you have any duplicates?

I've tried variations of filtering by business group/category, sorting by, grouping by. I can get it to list "customers", but when expanded it just shows every VM in the caegory, I can't work out how to kill all of the unwanted categories such as Sample Business View and VMs without backups. I thought that filtering it with a filter like 'where business view group = customers' would help but then I get an empty report with no data available.

Do you have groups created for each customer or you're using predefined groups?

[elwood]

You're right about the disk data. I removed everything disk related and the duplicates disappeared. I havn't tracked down exactly which field it was as i found slightly more appropriate fields to use which arn't causing the problem now.

I'm using groups created for each customer.
I've managed to get fairly close to what I need, by adding in the fields Business view Group and category, and filtering Catagory = customers and Group not equal to Uncategorized, and grouping by Business Group, I get a report closely approximating what I'm after except it still just lists the VMs in those groups. I'm sure I can export to Excel and sort some auto-calculation out in Excel but before I do that is there not just a simple way of auto-totalling the figures on a per customer basis? How do I get total number of VMs owned by one customer for example?

Thanks,
Eliot.

[Vitaliy S.]

You're right about the disk data. I removed everything disk related and the duplicates disappeared. I havn't tracked down exactly which field it was as i found slightly more appropriate fields to use which arn't causing the problem now.

It could be a virtual disk, cause for every disk you will have a line in the table. To avoid that, it is recommended to use total disk space/usage metrics.

I'm sure I can export to Excel and sort some auto-calculation out in Excel but before I do that is there not just a simple way of auto-totalling the figures on a per customer basis? How do I get total number of VMs owned by one customer for example?

It should be possible to do with VMs Configuration report, moreover this report already contains the data you're pulling out from custom configuration report.

[elwood]

The VM configuration report is useful yes, and as you say it has all the information (and more) that I need - plus, it auto-totals each group and tells me the number of VMs. The only downside is that there seems to be no granular control. I'd like to strip out information I don't need such as datastore, hostname and vCenter, and the grouping is currently statically set to group by the hosts that the VMs are sitting on rather than the business unit. There's no filter or sorting options for this report.

My customised report using Custom Infrastructure contains only the relavent metrics and is grouping correctly by business unit, only problem remaining is it's not auto-totalling the groups in the blue bar.

For now I figure I'll need to do this in Excel, but I wonder if a feature request for future development might be to include options to auto-total each group, or alternatively on the VM Configuration report to customize it with similar granular options that the Custom Infrastructure report has?

Eliot.

[Vitaliy S.]

Eliot, yes we will consider your feedback when discussing feature set for our next updates. Thanks!