Report Scope
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 hosts to your network--reports reflect the updates.
Before generating a report, you can select enterprise objects such as the storage arrays, hosts or host groups, fabrics, zones, or switches to include in the report scope.
Host Groups: Host groups primarily serve as a means of enforcing security controls, limiting a user's access to only the hosts in a user's IT Analytics domain. In the context of report scope, 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 the report scope, depending on the type of data the report supports: Devices, Shares, Volumes, and Deduplication/VTL Appliances. When selecting the host groups in the Scope Selector, the selections are displayed in the bottom display panel. provide an alternate grouping mechanism for a report scope.
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 selections are displayed in the bottom display panel.
Backup Server: You can select backup servers such as NetBackup Primary server, in the report scope, for Backup Manager reports.
Host Type: Indicates how a host has been commissioned in an enterprise, such as VM Guest, VM Server, VIO Guest, VIO Server, Oracle Container, Oracle Zone, Hyper-V Server, Hyper-V Guest or Others.
Datastores and Hypervisors: You can select datastores and hypervisors in the scope dialog box for Virtualization Manager reports.
Clusters: You can select clusters in the scope dialog box for Virtualization Manager reports. Clusters refer to the way ESX servers are grouped.
Arrays: You can select any of the following in the scope dialog box for Capacity reports:
Storage array
Array family
Array vendor
Array product
SAN Fabrics (including Zones and Switches): Select specific SAN Fabric objects to narrow the scope of a report.
Attributes: Attributes associated with objects such as hosts, storage arrays, libraries, drives, switches, host Oracle database, and host MS Exchange, enable logical groupings for reports; for example, OS version could be an attribute that you want to associate with hosts. Attributes enable you to define a data set based on a specific characteristic.
See About attributes .
See Host groups vs attributes.
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.
The following are the scope selection configurations for various reports: