Using Categories and Tags in Reports

[Mike102]

Hi,

I'm trying to create custom reports which show Category and Tag details from Virtual Centre, along with other information such as "number of vcpus". It seems that the only way to do this is to setup Business View Categories and Groups to mirror Virtual Centre Categories and Tags. Will Reporter support vSphere Tags natively in the future, like "Custom Attributes"? Also if I try and use the Business Group/Category to build a report, I am not able to get multiple Categories to appear as columns. For example, if I build a Report with the Scope on Category BU and Group HR, I would also like to display the Application Category, which has an Application tag. So one VM has these Category/Tags . I'm using Veeam One 9 update1.

Category,Tag
----------------
BU,HR
Application, Peoplesoft

thanks

Mike

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mike,

It seems that the only way to do this is to setup Business View Categories and Groups to mirror Virtual Centre Categories and Tags. Will Reporter support vSphere Tags natively in the future, like "Custom Attributes"?

Veeam ONE Business View is part of the entire product, and is responsible for managing vSphere Tags across all components. That said, if you want to use vSphere Tags in Monitor and Reporter, you will need to sync them from vCenter Server (can be done via Import functionality) and then leverage these tags to create BV groups (either dynamic or via static rules).

Also if I try and use the Business Group/Category to build a report, I am not able to get multiple Categories to appear as columns.

What reports are you trying to use? Would like to take a look at this behavior.

Thanks!

[Mike102]

Hi Vitally,

I appreciate the connection between Business View and Reporter, and have setup Business View Categories and Groups, and can create limited reports. I would rather not use Business View at all, and just have VC Tag Categories and Tags as an "Object Type" in Reporter (as Custom attributes is).
The report I'm using is Customer Reports==>Custom Infrastructure. I set the Scope to the Business View to a particular "Business Unit" I would like the report to output other Categories such as Application in the report.

thanks

Mike

[Vitaliy S.]

I would rather not use Business View at all, and just have VC Tag Categories and Tags as an "Object Type" in Reporter (as Custom attributes is).

Yeah, but what about other reports that have Business View as a scope for the reports, for example Protected VMs report? BV will allow you to group VMs based on any criteria you want. BTW, how do you write tags to vCenter Server today? Do you do it manually?

The report I'm using is Customer Reports==>Custom Infrastructure. I set the Scope to the Business View to a particular "Business Unit" I would like the report to output other Categories such as Application in the report.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. We will see if we can add vSphere Tags to this report in the upcoming release or not.

[Mike102]

Hi Vitally,

I appreciate how Business View works, and have setup dynamic categories for topics such as "Business Unit" and "Application" and then use a grouping expression, Case when Tag etc ... The Categories/Groups display fine in Business View and One Monitor. However, my issue is with reporting. For example, I would like to create a Custom report showing no. of vcpus, computer name and two Category headings, "Business Unit" and "Application"

Computer name, vcpus, Business Unit,Application, .

I can set the scope to "Business Unit", but can't seem to get a second column, "Application" in the report. is this possible? Should I open a support case for this? Is support for Tags as an object type, in Reporter being considered ?

thanks

Mike

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mike,

Yes, I understand your request. Currently, there is no way to display all groups the selected VMs belongs to in a single report. All reports are displaying only one group per object (VM).

Yes, I will ask our dev team to add Tags to custom infrastructure report in our next updates.

Thanks!

[gingerdazza]

Did this TAG capability ever get put into the latest 9.5 Veeam ONE product?

[Vitaliy S.]

Dazza,

Tags are already supported. You can categorize VMs by tags and then create reports based on this. Can you please clarify your question?

Thanks!

[gingerdazza]

I wanted to create a Veeam ONE custom report, but at the same time (v9.5) that you seem to have removed support for custom attributes and moved towards tags, you have also kept the "custom attributes" field in the custom infrastructure report but omitted the ability to view tags in it. Tags is not an available field in this report

I would love the ability to have multiple tags and then create a report like this:

VMName Mem vCPU Disk Size Tag1 Tag2 Tag3

......and group the VMs by a specified tag (i.e. Tag2)

A lovely feature request might be to have a report designer akin to Crystal Report Designer

[Vitaliy S.]

Ah, I see.

Yes, tags haven't been added yet as a property to this report, but you can use Tags to create Business View groups and then create reports based on these groups.

[gingerdazza]

This is why it would be beneficial to create a report builder front-end, so customers can build exactly the report they want from the ONE DB, rather than relying on Veeam devs to provide exactly the right options through the reporter GUI.

[Vitaliy S.]

We already started to move to this direction (check our report builder option ), but I agree with you that there should be a set of predefined reports (used by most of the customers) and functionality to build custom reports.

[gingerdazza]

Doesn't build reported just currently just enable grouping existing reports? Or can I use it as a true builder?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, currently it allows you to use existing tables, graphs from the saved reports (the original use case). Custom performance/configuration is the only way to create a report with your own properties/counters.

[DominikM]

Thumbs up for having the option to get the VMware Tag definition in to the custom Infrastructure Report.
The work around with the business view doesn't work für me, because we categorize VMs with several tags.

I hope this feature makes it in the next release.

[Shestakov]

Hello Dominik,
Your request is taken into account.
Thanks!

[wishr]

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick update on this one. vSphere tags will be available in the Custom infrastructure report in the upcoming v11 release.

Thanks