When do I use Report Library vs. Global Reports for statistics?

ViPR SRM strives to provide a single pane of glass view into the entire environment while keeping the specifics on each platform intact.  Towards this objective, Global Reports are put together to meet the first objective while Report Library is all about details around a specific platform.

Global Reports consist of the following categories of reports:

• Dashboards: View high-level summaries for storage and networks
• Explore: Investigate CIs and their configuration and performance data
• Operations: Monitor and validate alerts, compliance, service level agreements, and situations to watch; and
• Planning: Analyze capacity trends and plan for future growth.

Enterprise Capacity Dashboard, for instance, is one of the Dashboard reports that summarizes block storage in the environment.  In this Dashboard, a VMAX LUN is treated the same as an VNX Block LUN.

Another example of a global report I would like to call out is under the Explore node.  It is for a host.  It is the Host CI dialog - within which is included a topology map amongst other reports. For this example, data for this topology map is consolidated from:

1. PhysicalHost SP,
2. One of the switch/fabric SPs – Cisco and/or Brocade; and
3. One of the Storage Systems SPs – VNX, HP P9000 and VMAX SPs

And yet another example of a global report is the Alerts Dashboard.  As you can see it consolidates alerts from all the monitored devices in an attempt to highlight the tension points in the environment irrespective of its type, vendor, etc.

Coming to the Report Library now, here is where you can look at the specifics of a certain platform.  Note that within the Report Library of a specific platform, you would find information only about that platform.

For example, in VMAX Report Library, you could look at the pools and its distribution by Target Protection.

Jumping to VMware Report Library now, to highlight the variety of reporting within the Report Libraries, here is an example of ESX Cluster summary:

So to summarize, Global Reports are all about summaries and abstraction whereas Report Libraries are all about specifics.

I’m hoping this serves as a starting point to more curiosity.  Please let me know if there are specific questions you are trying to answer and we can help you through it either via Global Reports or Reports Libraries.

Thanks!