Asking the Hard Questions: Reporting in ViPR SRM

ViPR SRM’s key business proposition is its ability to expose data across multiple infrastructure siloes, enabling an administrator to make better decisions. The challenge for that administrator becomes how to best synthesize valuable information from all of that raw data to maximize investment. When attempting to tackle this problem, users discover that there are easy questions and hard questions. Typically, the greatest value and return on investment results from being able to answer the hard questions. While many of ViPR SRM’s built-in reports answer most of the hard questions, the highest value questions are inevitably those unique to the business. To answer these, administrators must use ViPR SRM’s custom reporting capabilities.

Daniel and Tiffany Stafford’s Knowledge Sharing article provides a tutorial on reporting in ViPR SRM, structured from the simple to the complex. Starting from the perspective of a new administrator, they build the foundational knowledge necessary to create custom reports which address specific business problems. The authors employ a graphical approach to present recipes which can be used as-is to immediately get interesting and valuable results not included in an off-the-shelf install.

Written as an easy to understand ‘how-to’ guide in which previously learned skills build on each other, this article enables a very complex set of capabilities to be taught in a relatively short time. It can be read by itself, but for maximum benefit it is intended as a sort of lab guide for readers to follow in their own ViPR SRM environment as they read. Links to additional resources for learning more are also provided.

Storage Engineers, VMware Administrators, DBAs, as well as general infrastructure and cloud managers can all use this article to extract additional insight from their environment.

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